China Mars Mission ready for 2028 launch, will bring back 600 grams of Martian soil

China is moving ahead with sending a mission to Mars two years earlier than its initial plans. It announced that it is ready to launch Tianwen-3 mission to Mars in 2028. Liu Jizhong, chief designer of China’s Mars mission, said on Thursday that the team is also on track to bring back samples from the red planet.

The announcement was made at the Second International Conference on Deep Space Exploration in Huangshan, Anhui province. Liu stated that they would bring back around 600 grams of Martian soil. Moving the mission up by two years indicates that China is confident of successfully launching the Mars mission. Earlier, it was to send the spacecraft by 2030, but now it will fly away in 2028.

Since the mission will now launch in 2028 instead of 2030, its return with the samples is also likely to move ahead to 2031. This is as per what Tianwen-1 mission lead Sun Zezhou said at the Nanjing University in 2022.

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Experts say that if China successfully carries out the exercise, it will become the leader in space exploration. Liu added that searching for signs of life would be the mission's top scientific goal.

Explaining how the mission will work, Liu told the attendees that two Long March 5 rockets would be used to send Tianwen-3 lander-ascender combination and the orbiter-return module combination to Mars.

The technologies being used for the Mars mission include those that were previously a part of the Chang’e-5 and Chang’e-6 moon sample return missions and the Tianwen-1 Mars landing mission, he said.

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Liu also told state news agency Xinhua about the methods that will be implemented to collect the samples once the spacecraft lands on Mars. These would include multi-point surface scooping, fixed-point deep drilling and rover-based sampling,

What's happening with NASA's Mars Sample Return mission

The US is still struggling with its plans to send its sample mission to Mars. It has been in jeopardy ever since it was revealed that the return mission would cost up to $11 billion. The timeline was also stretched until 2040. The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission was supposed to collect samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

The space agency has reached out to seven aerospace companies and asked them to come up with ideas to speed up the mission, as well as reduce its costs. NASA wants to bring back the samples in the 2030s.

Meanwhile, India has also announced plans to reach Mars and plans to land a rover and a helicopter. As part of Mangalyaan-2, a supersonic parachute and a sky crane will lower the rover onto the Martian surface.