14 DAY TRIAL // Come this October, China and the Russian Federation will launch one of their first joint missions, an orbiter destined to study the surface of Mars. The main goal of the mission is to hunt for signs of liquid water on the Red Planet, and also to investigate water-generated landscapes.
Originally, the two countries planned to launch their joint mission in October 2009. however, by the time they were ready to do so, the window of opportunity had already closed, and so they had to wait for the next favorable planetary alignment.
The announcement was made in an article published on Sunday in the newspaper People's Daily. The piece went on to say that the spacecraft will build upon work carried out by its precursors.
At this point, there are three working orbiters surrounding Mars – the NASA Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express, Daily Galaxy reports.
This new mission is entirely founded on discoveries made over the last decades or so, which confirmed that liquid water indeed flowed on the surface of Mars in the distant past. According to some scientists, there hasn't been liquid water on the Red Planet for more than a billion years.
The Yinghuo-1space probe is bound to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Its main payload is the Phobos Explorer, a robot designed to conduct investigations on one of Mars' diminutive moons. This is the Russian component of the mission.
The Russian Federal Space Agency (RosCosmos) has been trying to land a probe on the tiny captured asteroids for a very long time, but thus far all their attempts have ended in failure, due partially to the complex nature of the necessary maneuvers and procedures.
In addition to this endeavor, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) is also pushing for a solo mission to the Red Planet, which it plans to launch as early as 2013. This spacecraft is built at the same time as a lunar explorer and several space modules destined for a future space station.
In the end, China wants to reach parity in space with Russia and the United States, and exceed them if possible. Given that RosCosmos prefers to use old, reliable technologies, and that the US is no longer willing to invest big bucks in space exploration, this new scenarios is not at all unlikely.
CNSA has already began preliminary work for constructing the country's first space station by 2020, and these endeavors include the first attempt at orbital docking between two spacecraft. The event will take place later in the year.
If all goes well, 2012 will see a similar maneuver being performed by a manned space capsule, and everything will be a straight shot from there. Meanwhile, the country will also be working on setting the basis of its Baidu satellite navigation system.