[meteorite-list] China Plans Comet Mission

[Ron Baalke]

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-07-06T071816Z_01_MCC626281_RTRUKOC_0_SPACE-CHINA.xml

China counts down for own comet kamikaze mission
Reuters
July 6, 2005

BEIJING (Reuters) - China is drawing up its own version of the
U.S.-built Deep Impact probe, domestic media reported on Wednesday, two
days after the American spacecraft smashed into a comet.

The third nation to launch a man into space has lofty space ambitions
that include putting two astronauts into orbit this September and
eventually sending up a space station and even a manned mission to the moon.

"Actually, our country has its own Deep Impact plans, it's just we've
never revealed them to the public before," the Beijing News quoted
Chinese astronomer Zhao Haibin as saying.

"Right now, our focus is on a moon probe, but once that's successful, we
will immediately start pursuing this plan."

The main goal of NASA's Deep Impact mission was to knock free primordial
materials from the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 that could unlock the
secret of how life formed on Earth.

China's mission would instead be mainly aimed at protecting the planet
from being hit by a comet or asteroid, Zhao said, referring to the kind
of doomsday scenario shown in the 1998 film "Deep Impact", for which the
U.S. spacecraft was named.

As opposed to NASA's "impacting" method, China would use a "more clever"
method that could be called "pasting", he said, explaining the plan was
to soft-land a craft with an engine capable of pushing a comet or
asteroid off a collision course.

Zhao said he and other astronomers at the Nanjing Zijinshan Observatory
in eastern China had tracked more than 700 space rocks potentially on
track to hit the Earth by the end of June.

But China still had to overcome technical obstacles before it could send
a comet collider into space, Xinhua news agency quoted Huang Chunping,
the lead engineer behind the rocket that sent China's first man into
space in 2003, as saying.

"We still need to make sure that scientific data could be successfully
transmitted back to the Earth via the impactor's mothership," Huang said.