Beijing : China unveiled plans to send a rover to Mars around 2020 to explore the Red Planet and launch 150 long range carrier rockets in the next five years for its ambitious space missions.
“The Mars probe is expected to orbit the red planet, land and deploy a rover all in one mission, which 1is quite difficult to achieve,” Xu Dazhe, director of the National Space Administration told the media here.
Xu said the Chinese government has the Mars mission in early this year.
Stressing the mission’s importance and difficulty, he said that although China has sent spacecraft deep into space, “only by completing this Mars probe mission can China say it has embarked on the exploration of deep space in the true sense.”