“Mars explorer” Zhang Rongqiao shed tears when China successfully landed on Mars last May, the culmination of the daring decision to send an orbiter, lander and rover on the nation’s first launch mission to that planet. Why the tears? “I got the taste of the joy of achievement—just like the Chinese saying ‘it takes ten years to sharpen a good sword,’” Zhang answers, Xinhua reported yesterday.
Zhang, responsible for both the technical work (engineering development, launch and flight control) and organizing the mission’s scientific research, told Xinhua that the team faces enormous challenges, given that they knew little about Mars’s surface topography, meteorological conditions, and space environment before arriving. “We may not even know what we do not know about,” he commented.
But Mars is only the first step in China’s “leap from the exploration of the Earth-Moon system to interplanetary exploration,” and then to interstellar exploration, as Xinhua observed.
“Zhang believes that the success of [Mars orbiter] Tianwen-1 will greatly promote the development of China’s space science, especially planetary science research,” because scientists will acquire first-hand data in Martian science which can “serve as the basic foundation for planetary science research. The Tianwen-1 mission is the first step in China’s planetary exploration, which will be followed by asteroid exploration, Mars sample return and Jovian system and interplanetary flyby exploration, according to Zhang. In the future, China will carry out more deep-space exploration activities, and make a Chinese contribution to the further understanding of the universe by humankind, he said.” (http://www.news.cn/english/2021-12/16/c_1310377159.htm)
