China intends to send two launches to Mars to take samples from the surface of the planet and bring them back to Earth by around 2028. This specific goal for China’s upcoming Tianwen-3 mission was reported on Sept. 5 by Liu Jizhong the mission’s chief designer. Unless another space agency changes its plans, this will be the first sample-return mission to Mars.
The top scientific priority of the mission is to look for traces of life on the red planet, and care will be taken to prevent the introduction of any microbes from Earth.
China is open to international cooperation on sample and data sharing, on payload design, and on future missions.
“Currently, looking at the progress of various countries around the world, China is expected to become the first country to return samples from Mars,” Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration project, remarked during this year’s China Space Day on April 24.
Looking ahead, the Tianwen-4 mission, still in early planning stages, is aiming to explore Jupiter and its moons, and then travel to Uranus.
“Tianwen” ("Heavenly Questions” or “Questions to Heaven") is the name of a famous Classical Chinese poem. The Tianwen-1 mission landed on Mars in 2021, and Tianwen-2—an asteroid sample-return mission like NASA’s OSIRIS-REx or JAXA’s Hayabusa2—is slated to launch next year.