Tianwen 2 Mission
- September 28, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Tianwen 2 Mission
Subject: Science and technology
Context :At the heels of NASA, China is set to deflect a 40 m diameter earth-crossing asteroid.
Concept :
About the Mission
- China plans to launch its second-ever deep space exploration effort in 2025(Tianwen 2), according to the chief designer of the country’s Tianwen 1 Mars mission.
- The 10-year-plus Tianwen 2 mission will first target the small near-Earth asteroid Kamo’oalewa, which may actually be a blasted-off piece of Earth’s moon.
- The spacecraft will collect samples from the space rock using a touch-and-go technique similar to those demonstrated by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex asteroid probes.
- Tianwen 2 will also attempt an unprecedented anchor-and-attach method, using four robotic arms to land on Kamo’oalewa, with drills on the arms securing the probe to the surface of the 130-foot-wide (40 meters) asteroid.
- Tianwen 2 is expected to return to Earth more than two years after launch, dropping off its invaluable cargo. But that won’t be the end of the mission.
- Following release of its re-entry capsule, Tianwen 2 will use Earth’s gravity to help propel it out toward another ancient relic of the solar system: an “active asteroid,” an object with properties of both asteroids and comets. (Active asteroids used to be known as main-belt comets, but that term has lately fallen out of fashion because these bodies tend to be more asteroid-like in composition.)
About Tianwen-1:
- China’s first Mars probe is called Tianwen-1 (formerly Huoxing 1).
- The spacecraft consists of an orbiter, a lander and a rover.
- Launched last year on a Long March 5 rocket from Xichang, China.
- Landing site: Somewhere in Utopia Planitia, a vast plain in Mars’ northern latitudes and the same place NASA’s Viking 2 mission landed in the 1970s.
Asteroids
- Asteroids are also known as minor planets.
- They are rocky remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
- Most asteroids are irregularly shaped, though a few are nearly spherical and are known to have a small companion moon (some have two moons).
Classification of Asteroids:
- Main Asteroid Belt: The majority of known asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
- Trojans: These asteroids share an orbit with a larger planet, but do not collide with it because they gather around two special places in the orbit (called the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points). There, the gravitational pull from the sun and the planet are balanced.