“The difficulty of getting the orbiter into orbit around Mars is equal to hitting a golf ball from Tokyo into a hole in Paris,” Pang said adding that China is ready to conduct its own exploration of Mars in the near future.
“The carrier rocket Long March 5, with its 25 metric tons of low-Earth orbit carrying capacity and 14 tonnes of geostationary transfer orbit carrying capacity, can fully sustain our own Mars exploration projects,” he said.
Jiao Weixin, a professor at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University told the daily that “with the mission launched within a very short period, India eyes the political influence hereby brought and intends to be the first one in Asia that orbits Mars.”
