Xi Jinping and Donald Trump lead the new space career

The presidents of China, Xi Jinping, and the United States, Donald Trump, have been engaged in a new competition whose scenario leaves the Earth and is projected into outer space. The great Asian power aspires to become the second country to step on the surface of Mars and to demonstrate that its technology is on a par with that of the United States. In a little less than a hundred days, it will launch a powerful space launcher that should put into orbit and set its first explorer of territories beyond our planet on the Red Planet. 

When, after seven months of navigating the cosmos and travelling around 60 million kilometres - some 150 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon - it reaches the planet's orbit in February 2021, the Asian probe will release a surface module from which the first all-terrain vehicle made in China will descend and roll around the Red Planet. If Xi Jinping succeeds in seeing his aspirations fulfilled, he will demonstrate to Donald Trump, to the business and scientific world of the United States and to the entire world the great potential of his industrial sector.

Although China is keeping the details of the ambitious project secret, its space agency has just revealed the name of the initiative, which will inaugurate a new and important step in its interplanetary programme. The mission has been named "Tianwen-1" - in Spanish, "cuestiones celestiales" - in honour of the renowned ancient Chinese poet Qu Yuan and the title of one of his most famous poems.

The announcement was made to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the launch of China's first artificial satellite - Dong Fang Hong 1, on 24 April 1970 - and just under 100 days from the start of the mission, scheduled to take off on 23 July and 8 August.

Around the same time, the United States is also sending a vehicle to Mars for its Mars 2020 mission, which, like China, includes a wheeled vehicle or rover to explore the Martian surface and subsoil. The difference between the two projects is that the U.S. Space Agency (NASA) has the experience of successfully sending a total of 20 missions to the Red Planet, of which four between 1997 and 2012 have been all-terrain vehicles.

The starting gun of a new space race between China and the United States - which leaves Russia and Europe aside - has the magnificent prize of being able to discover if there is any source of present life or remains of past life in the Martian subsoil.

2020 is a great year for the exploration of Mars and the summer period is the most appropriate. At that time, celestial mechanics dictate that the Red Planet is closer to Earth, which makes it easier for the probes that depart from our planet to cross space and load and consume as little fuel as possible, thus increasing the weight of the equipment on board.

But just getting to Mars and entering its atmosphere is a huge new challenge for Chinese engineers, considering that since the 1960s there have been nearly 60 missions to the Red Planet, about half of them unsuccessful. The great personal challenge is taken up by Zhang Rongqiao, the chief architect of the Mars exploration programme and its head, who in addition to building the probe has had to solve a large number of problems, for example how to ensure communications and control the mission from Earth.

Three projects are competing this summer to leave Earth and reach Mars early next year. Besides the Chinese one, the most important of all is NASA's Mars 2020, the U.S. space agency, scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 17. The third is the Emirate's Al Amal, which will jump into space from the Japanese space base in Tanegashima to study the planet from its orbit. A fourth mission was planned, the Russian-European ExoMars 2020, but due to technical difficulties in its development it has been relegated to 2022.

The Chinese Tianwen 1 is a 5-ton probe that houses a descent capsule and a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle to move around the rugged planet and perform experiments and measurements. Based on the Yutu 2 lunar vehicle, the rover is estimated to weigh about 240 kilos and measure 2 x 1.65 x 0.8 metres, about a quarter of the mass of a Smart utility car and slightly smaller.

Its work on the surface of the Red Planet will last 90 days, for which it has seven instruments on board, all of which are used to study the atmosphere and the magnetic and geological characteristics of the planet and to obtain clues about its origin. Among them are a radar, a microscope, a weather station and a color camera so that controllers on the ground can observe the terrain through which it moves.

NASA's Mars 2020 rover has been named "Perseverance", the name proposed by a young American student who won a nationwide competition established by the agency in which 28,000 students participated. It is a real laboratory on six wheels filled with instruments that will search for biomarkers in the Martian soil to try to discover if life ever existed on the planet.

In 2003, China became the third power to send a human being into space on board a launcher manufactured by its domestic industry. The combat pilot Yang Liwei became the first Chinese to orbit the Earth seven years ago, on October 15, after the Soviet Yuri Gagarin - on April 12, 1961 - and the American John Glenn on February 20, 1962. A total of 11 Chinese astronauts who have travelled into space, two of them women.

The previous Chinese president, Hu Jintao, tried to reach Mars about 9 years ago, but he didn't succeed. It was in November 2011 when the Yinghuo-1 probe took off from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome, along with the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, which was intended to collect samples from the Phobos moon of Mars. However, a few days after the start of the interplanetary journey, the Russian spacecraft to which the Chinese probe was attached suffered a failure that caused the total collapse of the mission.