94Ha Viewpoint
Today, at the launch ceremony of the main event of the 10th “China Space Day”, the National Space Administration issued the “Announcement on International Cooperation Opportunities for the Tianwen-3 Mars Sampling and Return Mission” to the international community, opening a total of 20 kg of mass resources of the Tianwen-3 probe to jointly carry out Mars exploration and research with international peers.
The Tianwen-3 mission is an important part of China’s planetary exploration project and is scheduled to be launched around 2028. The Tianwen-3 probe consists of a lander, an ascender, a server assembly, an orbiter, and a returner assembly, with a total of 6 scientific payloads. Among them, the orbiter’s orbit around Mars is a circular orbit of about 350 kilometers, with attitude orientation to the sun, a design life of no less than 5 years, and is equipped with a mid-infrared ultra-fine imaging spectrometer and a Mars global multi-color camera; the server’s orbit around Mars is a large elliptical orbit around Mars with a perigee of about 400 kilometers, with a stay-on-orbit detection of about 2 Mars years, a design life of no less than 5 years, and a sedimentation ENA aurora detector and a high-precision vector magnetometer; the lander is equipped with an ultra-wideband detection radar and a Raman-fluorescence spectrometer.
The mass resources for the Tianwen-3 international cooperation opened by the National Space Administration this time include orbiter resources of no more than 15 kilograms and server resources of no more than 5 kilograms. The National Space Administration said that it welcomes international partners to participate in the Tianwen-3 mission to jointly explore the mysteries of Mars and expand human cognition.
