China announced Wednesday it will launch a joint mission with Russia to Mars in 2009, marking "an important milestone" in space cooperation between the two countries. A small Chinese satellite will take off on a Russian rocket, according to the agreement signed Monday between the China National Space Administration and the Russian Federal Space Agency, the Chinese space body said.
The agreement, signed during an ongoing three-day visit to Russia by Chinese President Hu Jintao, follows pledges by Moscow in recent months to work closely with Beijing on exploration of both Mars and the moon.
"This is an important milestone in Sino-Russian space cooperation," the Chinese space administration said as it unveiled the details of the Mars mission in a statement posted on its website.
According to the agreement, a small satellite developed by China would be launched along with "Phobos Explorer," a Russian spacecraft, probably in October 2009, the administration reported. After entering Mars' orbit - 10 to 11 months later - the Chinese satellite would be detached from the spacecraft and probe the Martian space environment, it said.
The "Phobos Explorer," carrying equipment partly developed by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, would land on Phobos, a Martian moon, and return to Earth with soil samples, according to the administration. The trip to the Red Planet could be a case of Chinese money mixing with Russian science, according to observers.
"No one has more experience in space exploration than the Russians, and there's no question that their technology is far ahead of China's," said Tong Huiquan, an astronomer at the Nanchang Institute of Technology in eastern China.
The state-owned China Daily newspaper suggested the mission, which has previously been outlined in the Chinese media, was of scientific value, as it would yield information on the origins of the solar system and Earth.
Even so, many observers have seen China's revived interest in space as a reflection of its great power aspirations, and a source of national pride. "Our national strength has risen," Zhang Ming, an astronomy professor at eastern China's Nanjing University told AFP. "It's a road that we absolutely must travel."
In 2003 China successfully launched astronaut Yang Liwei into orbit, becoming the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to put a man in space.
It has said it hoped to launch a lunar exploration satellite some time this year as part of a programme that aimed to place an unmanned vehicle on the moon by 2012.
China's space program can be traced back to the mid-1950s, when it was started with Soviet help during a period of warm ties between the two giants of the Communist bloc.
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