The Tianwen-2 probe is the first of those launched by China with ionic propulsion. Not only is it on the way to a nearby asteroid to bring samples to the Earth: its one -decade trip also includes exploring a main belt kite, as far as a Chinese ship will have arrived.
China does not give truce. Just when NASA expects 24% of its budget cuts and the cancellation of 41 space missions, China has launched an extraordinarily ambitious scientific program that will take it throughout the solar system throughout the next decades.
Robotic Tianwen missions, which are just part of these plans, focus on exploring and bringing samples from other worlds. Tianwen-1 deployed on May 22, 2021 The first Chinese rover on the surface of Mars. Tianwen-2 will bring the first samples of the Kamo’oalewa miniluna at the end of 2027. Tianwen-3 will take advantage of what has been learned In previous missions to bring Martian soil samples, a milestone that the Chinese Space Administration Wait before the United States. Tianwen-4 will explore Jupiter and one of his moons.
Double objective. The Tianwen-2 probe took off on board a CZ-3B rocket from the Xichang space center on May 28. After successfully deploying its circular solar panels and performing an escape maneuver, it is directed to Asteroid 469219 Kamo’oalewawith which it will be found for the first time on July 4, 2026, and that will explore closely until April of the following year.
In November 2027, after releasing the reentry capsule with asteroid samples, Tianwen-2 will continue on its second goal: 311P/2013 P5 (PANSTARRS). It is a main belt kite, an active object with the orbit of an asteroid and the appearance of a kite that the Chinese ship plans to reach in 2035.
Crossing outstanding tasks. To achieve its objectives, Tianwen-2 will not be the first space mission to bring samples of an asteroid (Japan has done it twice and The United States got it in 2023 With Asteroid Bennu), nor the first probe to explore a comet (the European Space Agency landed in Comet 67p in 2014), but the first to do both.
China’s space administration is taking advantage of its previous experience to continue crossing outstanding tasks of the list: the Chang’e 2 mission visited an asteroid in 2012 and the Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 They brought samples of the visible face and the hidden face of the moon, respectively. When moving so fast, China begins to advance the rest of the nations in some of these milestones, as in the case of samples of the hidden face of the moon.
What are these objectives special. Tianwen-2 will not only serve to prepare the recovery of Mars samples. Kamo’oalewa is an interesting object in itself for being a minilun It can be a fragment of the true moon.
Tianwen-2 will deploy two small robots: a nanoorbital and a nanoatrizer that will make detections closely. Then, without landing, you will take asteroid samples with an extensible tube and a small excavator wheel to bring them to Earth. Next, it will take advantage of the gravitational assistance of the Earth to travel to the strange comet, which in photos of the Hubble telescope appears with six queues.
It will be the Chinese probe that best moves away from the Sun until the arrival of Tianwen-4 to Jupiter. A second probe, launched at the same time 2029, will arrive in Uranus in 2045. But China plans to go further with two missions to Neptune, whose launch is scheduled for 2029 and 2033, with the difference that the second would display an atmospheric probe on its Triton moon.
Image | Cnsa
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