China celebrated the beginning of its new year on Tuesday (New Year will be the year of the tiger). On the eve of the holidays, the country’s space program sent a special message from the Red Planet. The Chinese Tianon 1 spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars for almost a year, Recorded a selfie video Which shows the spacecraft passing in front of the planet. The new video was taken by a camera mounted on the end of a narrow arm that is 1.6 meters away from the orbiter, which the mission operators use to monitor the spacecraft’s health.
Highlights seen in the video include a moving solar panel and main engine and Tianon 1 fuel tanks. About halfway through the video, Mars’s ice-covered North Pole appears in the background as Tianon 1 orbits the Red Planet.
Tianon 1’s impressive video provides a rare glimpse of the spacecraft’s rotation around the other world. The release of this video on the Chinese New Year shows that the Chinese leadership is using a civilian space mission to instill a sense of national pride and establish China on the world stage as a power equal to the United States.
Part of this Chinese effort is propaganda; But there is no denying that the country’s space program is in progress. The Chinese government on Friday released a white paper outlining China’s civilian space strategy for the next five years, showing the country’s determination to continue its space program. This article states:
Over the next five years, China will integrate science and technology and space applications while pursuing a new development philosophy, creating a new development model, and achieving quality development requirements. This will be the beginning of a new journey towards space power. The space industry will contribute to the growth of China as a whole and to the global consensus and joint efforts in the field of space exploration and human development.
In the next half decade, China’s space program plans to complete the Tiangong space station and launch a space telescope. It is also planning to further study the “Human Landing Plan on the Moon” and research important technologies with the aim of paving the way for the exploration and development of space between Earth and the Moon. Finally, China wants to build a “research base” on the moon in cooperation with Russia and other international partners. The program puts China in direct competition with NASA. The US space agency, under the Artemis Accords, seeks to unite with nations and make a series of lunar landings in the late 2020s and early 2030s.
China plans to explore the moon and Mars with robotic spacecraft based on its initial efforts. With the Changhai 6 lunar probe, the country wants to collect and send lunar samples from the moon’s polar regions to Earth. China’s goal with the Changhai 7 lunar probe is also to explore the moon’s always shady craters; Places that are expected to contain ice. The Chinese also want to return Martian rocks to Earth and begin exploring Jupiter.
China’s five-year plan paints a very ambitious vision for space exploration. If realized, China will compete with NASA and US space companies by the end of this decade. Unfortunately, the white paper does not provide information on budgets and costs. China’s sovereignty over the package has always been non-transparent about its spending’s space program. Achieving some of the goals requires China to provide much more funding than it currently does in space investment; Therefore, China’s space programs are likely to depend on maintaining the relative health of its economy.
