China's ambitious and fast-growing space program is targeting a landing on the dark side of the moon by 2018, and reaching Mars before the end of the decade.
China's space agency held a press conference on Tuesday to mark the release of a policy paper, and outlined the government's goals for exploring deep space.
Wu Yanhua, deputy chief of the National Space Administration, said Beijing aims to launch its first Mars probe around 2020 to carry out orbiting and roving exploration, followed by a second mission that would include collection of surface samples from the red planet.
China launched an ion drive HEP-100MF thruster. It was jointly developed by research teams from the Harbin Institute of Technology (H.I.T.) and the China Academy of Space Technology's (CAST) Institute 502, successfully debuted Nov. 22 aboard an orbiting Shijian-17 satellite. The satellite was launched Nov. 3 by a Long March 5 rocket. This will be used for deep space missions.
China plans include sending probes to Jupiter and its moons. By around 2030, China hopes to be more competitive with NASA's deep space program.
China has its complete space white paper online
China's plans for the next 5 years in space are
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Reposted via Next Big Future
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