Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Tianwen 1 and various Mars missions
Mains level: Mars mission worldwide and their success
China landed a spacecraft on Mars carrying its first Mars rover in a big boost to its space ambitions.
UPSC may ask an MCQ asking: Which of the following is/are the space missions related to Mars? It may throw up 4-5 options (which we all get confused at after few months) like Cassini , InSight , Messanger, Voyager etc.
Tianwen-1 Mission
- The mission is named after the ancient Chinese poem ‘Questions to Heaven’, the Tianwen-1.
- It is an all-in-one orbiter; lander and rover will search the Martian surface for water, ice, investigate soil characteristics, and study the atmosphere, among completing other objectives.
- It will be the first to place ground-penetrating radar on the Martian surface, which will be able to study local geology, as well as rock, ice, and dirt distribution.
- The lander descended successfully onto the surface of the red planet carrying a rover named Zhurong, named after a god of fire for a planet known in Chinese as the planet of fire.
- Only the Soviet Union and the United States had previously carried out a successful landing on Mars.
Back2Basics: Various missions on Mars
- The USSR in 1971 became the first country to carry out a Mars landing– its ‘Mars 3’ lander being able to transmit data for 20 seconds from the Martian surface before failing.
- The country made it’s second and Mars landing two years later in 1973.
- The second country to reach Mars’s surface, the US, holds the record for the most number of Mars landings.
- Since 1976, it has achieved 8 successful Mars landings, the latest being the ‘InSight’ in 2019 (launched in 2018).
- India and the European Space Agency have been able to place their spacecraft in Mars’s orbit.
- India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) or ‘Mangalyaan’ was able to do so in September 2014, almost a year after its launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh.
- The Chinese mission now is expected to take off around the same time when NASA is launching its own Mars mission– the ambitious ‘Perseverance’ which aims to collect Martian samples and bring them back.
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