The mysterious craft, named the Long March rocket, will blast off the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, which is a Chinese space vehicle launch facility, or …

“They’re definitely on a long-term quest for lunar and planetary Solar System exploration,” James Head, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University who has worked with scientists in the Chinese Space Program, tells Of course, Mars missions are no easy feat, and China’s first attempt to reach the Red Planet didn’t even make it beyond Earth. newsletter With the second, China became the first country to make a successful soft landing on the far side.The Moon missions gave China experience in operating spacecraft beyond Earth orbit, but Mars is another story.The much greater distance means "a bigger light travel time, so you have to do things more slowly as the radio signal round trip time is large," said McDowell.It also means "you need a more sensitive ground station on Earth because the signals will be much fainter," he added, noting that there is a greater risk of failure.China has upgraded its monitoring stations in the far-western Xinjiang region and northeastern Heilongjiang province to meet the Mars mission requirements, state news agency Xinhua reported last week.The majority of the dozens of missions sent by the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and India to Mars since 1960 ended in failure.Tianwen-1 is not China's first attempt to go to Mars.A previous mission with Russia in 2011 ended prematurely as the launch failed.

China: Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center ... First space launch from the UK took place from here in October 2015 as part of 'At Sea Demonstration 15' . The country became the first nation in history to land and operate a rover on the far side of the Moon last year. The Long March-2F rocket carrying Shenzhou 11 manned spacecraft blasts off from launch pad on October 17, 2016 in Jiuquan, China. The United Arab Emirates launched a probe on Monday that will orbit Mars once it reaches the Red Planet.But the race to watch is between the United States and China, which has worked furiously to try and match Washington's supremacy in space.The Chinese mission has been named Tianwen-1 ("Questions to Heaven") in a nod to a classical poem that has verses about the cosmos.It is expected to launch on a Long March 5 -- China's biggest space rocket -- from the southern island of Hainan by Saturday, depending on the weather.Tianwen-1 is expected to arrive in February 2021 after a seven-month, 55-million-kilometre (34-million-mile) voyage.The mission includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a rover that will study the planet's soil. May 25, 2020. China space programme targets July launch for Mars mission. In 2011, the country attempted to send an orbiter to Mars called Yinghuo-1, piggybacking on a much larger Russian spacecraft bound for the planet called Phobos-Grunt. The three spacecraft will launch on top of one of China’s most powerful rockets, the Long March 5, and then travel through deep space together to the Red Planet. All rights reserved. China is about to launch a trio of spacecraft to Mars — including a roverGoogle Nest and Eero’s mesh Wi-Fi systems are steeply discountedIt’s a good time to buy if you want to bulk up your home connectionYou can get the upgraded OnePlus 7 Pro for $450 right nowThis model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage usually costs $699HP’s latest 15-inch Omen gaming laptop is $300 off at Best BuyIt packs in a six-core processor, the RTX 2060, a 300Hz refresh rate display, and moreApple’s refurbished AirPods Pro are over $50 off at Best BuyThis clinches the lowest price yet, but they’re not brand-newNvidia offers six months of GeForce Now with Hyper Scape’s battle pass for a discounted $24.95A really solid deal if you want to play Ubisoft’s new battle royale on PC Last year, it became the first nation to land a probe on the far side of the moon.“Before 2030, China will land on Mars, take samples on Mars, and return, which has never been realized by human beings before,” said Ouyang Ziyuan, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician and first chief scientist of China’s lunar probe project, according to the “China has the ability to fly further and we will continue our exploration,” Ouyang said.Thursday’s liftoff of the Long March-5 Y4 marks the second of three international missions to Mars scheduled for this month. "As a first try for China, I don't expect it to do anything significant beyond what the US has already done," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.The United States has already sent four rovers to Mars since the late 1990s.The next one, Perseverance, is an SUV-sized vehicle that will look for signs of ancient microbial life, and gather rock and soil samples with the goal of bringing them back to Earth on another mission in 2031.The Chinese mission is similar to NASA's Viking missions in 1975-1976, in that it has both an orbiter and a lander, McDowell said.Tianwen-1 is "broadly comparable to Viking in its scope and ambition," he added.After watching the United States and the Soviet Union lead the way during the Cold War, China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme. “That’s why it’s so important to have abundant surface exploration and rovers. The rocket was an American 'Terrier-Orion' sounding rocket. If the ambitious mission succeeds, China will become one of only a handful of countries to reach and orbit Mars.