Member Wu Weiren: Preparing to Launch Chang’e 5 by the End of This Year, and a Mars Rover the Next Yea
On the afternoon of March 3, before the opening of the second session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the first committee passage of the Two Sessions was opened in 2019. Wu Weiren, member of the national committee of CPPCC and the chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program said that at the end of this year, we are preparing to launch Chang’e 5 to achieve the return of lunar sampling. Next year we will launch a Mars rover to orbit, land and explore Mars.
In response to the reporter’s question about “How is the current state of Yutu-2”, Wu Weiren said that due to the cycle of the moon’s rotation and revolution, there are always 14 days of darkness on the moon, which reduces the temperature to minus 190 degrees Celsius. This is a temperature that no component or electronic component can withstand; therefore, we can only set it to a dormant state to ensure its safety during nights on the Moon. A few days ago, both two phases automatically woke up and entered the working state. With a good current condition, it has now entered the third week on the Moon.
Wu Weiren said that the current exploration of the topography of the landing zone has been completed; for the following stage, Yutu is marching northwest toward the landing site. We have obtained a lot of scientific data in the past few months, and these scientific data are recently ready to be released to the whole country and the world.
Wu Weiren said that the world’s aerospace has experienced a development of over a hundred years, and 60 years for China. In the past six decades, we have made a number of achievements, but there still is a huge distance between China and the world’s space powers. We must speed up our pace of development.