China marks its 8th Space Day with impressive accomplishments China marked its eighth Space Day on Monday, with a grand opening ceremony held in Hefei, capital of East China’s Anhui Province. At the event which also kick-started the annual China Space Conference, China unveiled significant accomplishments in the aerospace domain in the past year and outlined exciting plans for future exploration, winning applauds from attendees from all over the world.
The opening ceremony of the Space Day of China had quite a friendly atmosphere from the very beginning, with distinguished guests from space agencies of countries including France, Argentina and Thailand as well as international organizations like the European Space Agency (ESA) and the United Nations, sending congratulatory messages to the China National Space Administration (CNSA) as the Chinese national space agency celebrated the 30th anniversary of its establishment.
China released the country’s first-ever global color image map of Mars at the Monday event. The map was produced by processing a mosaic with 14,747 images obtained by the Moderate Resolution Imagining Camera onboard the country’s Tianwen-1 orbiter, the Global Times learned from the CNSA.
Tianwen-1, successfully launched on July 23, 2023, was China’s first interplanetary exploration. After a flight of 202 days, Tianwen-1 reached Mars’ orbit and on May 15, 2021, the Zhurong rover landed on the red planet. So far, the rover has trekked 1,921 meters on the Mars surface in 385 Martian days – long past its designed 90 days service life.
According to the CNSA on Monday, 13 pieces of payload onboard the Tianwen-1 mission have obtained 1,800 gigabytes of raw scientific data, formulating standard data products, through which scientists and research teams have made several discoveries.
China has also been engaged with international partners in sharing fruits of its landmark Chang’e-5 lunar sample returning mission.
According to the CNSA, China gifted 1.5 grams of Chang’e-5 lunar samples to France during French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China in early April and the same amount of the precious samples to Russia during Russian President Vladmir Putin’s China visit on February 4, 2022.
So far, scientists and researchers from Australia, Russia, France, the US, the UK and Sweden have joined in the study of the lunar samples retrieved by the Chinese mission, according to the CNSA.
“The international sharing [of these samples] and joining forces to study these samples is a major event in the global scientific circle, and it is also a crucial way for us to understand the formation and evolution of the moon. China has carried out aerospace exchange and cooperation with other countries based on the principle of peaceful use, equality and mutual benefit, jointly pushing forward the building of a shared future of mankind in the outer space,” said the CNSA in a statement it provided to the Global Times on Monday.
With the completion of the in-orbit assembly and building of China Space Station in 2022, Zhou Jianping, chief architect of China’s manned space program, was recognized with the Qian Xuesen Highest Award at the Monday event. Qian (1911-2009) was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics.
—The Daily Mail-Global Times News Exchange Item.
