China aims to create a next-generation surface map of Mars in new plans that unite the modern space race with the AI race.
The Chinese plan has the ambitious goal of completing a new geological map of Mars by 2028, using AI and data from the country’s first mission to the Red Planet.
During the original space race, the U.S. competed with the Soviet Union to put the first person on the Moon, spurring technological advances that eventually found applications beyond space exploration. Now, with a new competitor and a new target, the U.S. and China are competing in the race to Mars, bringing AI development along for the ride.
Tianwen-3
China’s next planned mission to Mars is Tianwen-3, a robotic sample-return mission currently targeting a 2028 launch and the return of Martian material to Earth as early as 2031. If successful on that timetable, China could become the first nation to return samples from Mars.
The mission demonstrates how far the Chinese space program has come. The U.S. successfully landed its first Mars rover, Sojourner, in 1997, giving NASA more than a two-decade head start in robotic surface exploration before China’s first successful Mars mission.
Tianwen-3 aims to return a little more than one pound of Martian surface material to Earth. Although existing rovers such as NASA’s Perseverance possess sophisticated onboard scientific instruments, returning samples would allow researchers to examine Martian material using laboratory equipment too large or complex to send to the planet.
That capability could be particularly important for addressing one of the most compelling questions in planetary science: whether life ever existed on Mars. Recent discoveries have identified organic compounds and other potentially intriguing chemical signatures in Martian rocks, although organic material alone is not evidence of past life. Returned samples could enable much more detailed investigations of their origins.
Mapping Mars
According to the project’s chief scientist, Hou Zengqian, China will complete its geological map of the Martian surface before Tianwen-3’s launch. He says this map is an essential element of the sample return mission. Although a landing site has yet to be officially selected, the Chinese team says it will produce a series of atlases of the eventual landing region, along with a detailed map at a scale of 1:50,000.
The global geological map is currently planned at a scale of 1:5 million. To put that into perspective, a globe of Mars produced at that scale would be about 4.5 feet in diameter. Commercially available globes of Earth typically range from scales of approximately 1:25 million to 1:85 million.
Much of the underlying data comes from the original Tianwen-1 mission, which reached Mars in 2021 and included both the Zhurong rover and an orbiter. Zhurong spent almost a year traveling slightly more than a mile across the Utopia Planitia plain. China is not relying solely on its own observations for the mapping project, however, and is supplementing them with datasets from the U.S. and European Space Agency.
Mars and Beyond
Researchers say the work undertaken for the mapping project will produce a model that could later be applied to other bodies in the Solar System, including Venus, the Moon, and nearby asteroids.
Additionally, the project aims to develop a new system for describing the geological periods of Mars, which researchers hope could eventually become a widely adopted standard.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has faced significant challenges developing its own Mars sample-return architecture. NASA’s plans to retrieve samples currently being collected by Perseverance have undergone repeated redesigns amid concerns over cost, complexity, and schedule.
Those challenges could allow China to achieve one of planetary science’s most significant remaining milestones. If Tianwen-3 launches on schedule and successfully delivers its samples to Earth, China could become the first nation to bring pieces of Mars back to laboratories on our planet.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.