In 211 BC, at the Taishi Ling Bureau of The City of Xianyang in Qin, the stars were observing the celestial phenomena, and an area seemed to be somewhat abnormal. It is called Xin su, one of the twenty-eight houses of traditional Chinese astrology, and has the symbol of the Ming Hall of the Son of Heaven. At this time, a faint red star was slowly approaching, and it became brighter and brighter. However, after reaching the heart area, it stopped moving, as if staying in the heart. As the days passed, the situation became even more unusual, its trajectory did not advance and retreat, it was actually retrograde, and at this time it seemed so strange in the whole starry sky. This is the few records of "thirty-six years, the confusion and guarding the heart" in the "History of the First Emperor of Qin", an ordinary night more than two thousand years ago.
All along, I have underestimated the desire of my ancestors to explore the star universe, "At the beginning of ancient times, who preached?" The upper and lower are not formed, why should they be examined? As early as the pre-Qin dynasty, Qu Yuan was on the land of Jingchu and issued the most simple greeting to the nature of heaven and earth, and only a hundred years after he threw himself into the river, an astronomical vision about Mars was also officially written into the Danqing history of the Chinese nation. The "Book of History and Heavenly Officials" is the result of the long-term exploration of the ancestors, with the naked eye, pushing the changes of the stars. At a glance of a thousand years, the ancient starry sky appeared in front of me like a crossing, it was the bright moon of Qin Shi, it was the eternal Ziwei, and it was still so dazzling.
Astronomical map of Suzhou Zhongwangfu
Chang'e should repent of stealing the elixir, the blue sea, the blue sky and the night heart, when the ancient legend is combined with the actual project, the cold and hard metal shell also carries the weight of history. On November 5, 2007, the Chinese people should remember this day, at 11:38 a.m., the Chang'e-1 probe ended its near-moon braking and successfully entered the orbit around the moon. In that nightmare thousand-year-old Guanghan Palace, on top of the jade disk that was out of reach, China's spacecraft jumped out of the arms of Mother Earth for the first time and took the most important step in the substantive exploration of extraterrestrial galaxies. However, not long after, Chang'e-2 also embarked on her journey, and after completing the historical mission of the exploration mission, it flew alone into the deep space of the universe.
"Wind up! Wrap it up! How many people still remember the moment when Ouyang Ziyuan and Academician Sun Jiadong embraced each other excitedly at the flight control center, and at this time, they were still so confused that they were still so dancing and struggling to extricate themselves. As a young man who is eager for space, I can especially understand this mood, and the vastness of the universe can no longer stop the pace of Chinese exploration.
Chang'e-1 confirmed its entry into lunar orbit
China's deep space exploration can be said to be carried out simultaneously with the lunar exploration project, but the process is much more tortuous. In October 2005, the Chinese Academy of Sciences received an e-mail from the Institute of Space Of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which opened the door to Sino-Russian cooperation in the exploration of Mars and also contributed to the establishment of the "Firefly One" probe project. Although it is called cooperation, the Forbes-Soil probe leaves us with only 110 kilograms of space payload margin, jokingly saying that a hundred kilograms can not even fit me, for the vast deep space, what can the probe do. But for China at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this hundred kilograms is so hard-won and precious.
After several rounds of consultations and negotiations, on March 26, 2007, China and Russia signed an agreement on joint exploration of Mars, and the Shanghai Space Agency was responsible for undertaking the development of Firefly-1 to ensure that it could catch up with the October 2009 window and take the Russian "Forbes-Soil" probe to Mars together. It was after our engineers worked day and night for this, and after successive breakthroughs in a number of key technologies, the prototype detector arrived in Moscow. However, the News of Delays in Progress from the Russian side has been coming one after another, just like this damn fate, the Russian space companies finally officially admitted on September 20 that they could not catch the October launch window, and planned to postpone the launch for two years.
At 3 a.m. on November 9, 2011, the Zenith carrier rocket carrying the Forbes-Soil and Firefly-1 probes took off. With the help of the powerful deep space exploration network left by the Soviet Union, Chinese seems to be only one step away from Mars. However, it was this step that waited for another decade. In fact, Russia did not break the curse of Mars, the Forbes was lost, and fate, while taunting the Russians, also played with China. Five years of hard work burned to the ground! How many people's unsung contributions have gone into the dust.
Forbes-Soil Mars rover
Glory belongs only to the joy of the victors, and on September 24, 2014, the Indian Mangalian probe successfully entered the orbit of Mars, becoming the first country in Asia to conduct Mars exploration. Suddenly, public opinion was shaken, and the news that China's aerospace lagged behind India was incessant, as if it had fallen into the third echelon. But the harsh reality is that at this time, China's aerospace industry does not have a large-tonnage carrier rocket and no perfect deep space exploration network. Therefore, in this era when public knowledge is the most prevalent, in the face of ridicule and ridicule from the outside world, Chinese astronauts can only silently hold in their hearts and endure on their heads.
In September of the same year, the Bureau of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense started the preliminary development of China's Mars exploration mission, and after several rounds of program demonstration and optimization, in January 2016, China's planetary exploration project was officially approved. Mars exploration, Chinese is bound to be completed independently through their own efforts. This historical mission, so inevitably, fell on the long march five, the fattest in the Long March family. As a new type of large-scale launch vehicle, it integrates many advanced technologies in China at that time, and was born as the chosen son, which attracted everyone's attention.
On November 3, 2016, the Long March 5 Yaoyi rocket was launched for the first time at the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Hainan, with huge waves rushing, the fire dragon unsheathed, and the tail flame of the hydrogen and oxygen engine, like the sun soaring into the sky, the momentum was magnificent, the rumbling sound, pressing against the people on the coast, mixed with the excited screams, was particularly shocking. At the same time, the atmosphere in the flight control hall seemed somewhat solemn and tense.
Time back to 10:30, the launch tower 1, 3 booster suspected liquid oxygen leakage, fortunately there is no danger, at 15:48, the liquid hydrogen large flow filling is completed. At 17 o'clock, the failure was reported again, the first-level circulating pre-cooling failed, at 17:36, the discharge pre-cooling effect was still not good, and at 19:33, there was good news, and the temperature of the first-class hydrogen pump shaft finally dropped. At 20:38, 3 minutes before launch, the launch was suspended again, and the core primary oxygen filling connector did not fall off. At 20:40, when the program entered -90 seconds, it failed again, the control master computer reported an error, and the launch was terminated. Finally, at 20:43, the ignition was launched, and the whole process was thrilling. Just when we thought we were relieved, the flight control center sent news that the core secondary engine failure was shut down in advance, and finally the Shijian Seventeen satellite was sent into the predetermined orbit by extending the combustion time of the upper stage, achieving the expected goal.
In the hours leading up to this launch, one failure after another, in this complex system engineering, can have a fatal impact. Although the complete success of the launch mission gave the outside world a proud joy, the successive failures left a shadow on each participating unit, and they were secretly alarmed.
Long March 5 Yao 4 rocket
In order to verify the reliability of the Long March 5, the Changwu Yao-2 rocket was launched again on July 2, 2017. Unfortunately, at 346 seconds, the rocket suddenly failed, the secondary engine failed to ignite smoothly, and the rocket and the experimental satellite on board crashed into the Pacific Ocean. This failure can be described as the death of China's spaceflight, which means that the next lunar surface sampling return, Tiangong space station, Mars exploration plan and other projects, all indefinitely postponed, China's dream of a space power has once again become far away.
Some people say that this is the darkest moment of China's space flight, which is not exaggerated at all. For such probabilistic problems that arise in systems engineering, our most effective analysis method is either to obtain detailed raw data or to reproduce the problem in flight. Rocket wreckage crashed in the Pacific Ocean, vast sea, where to search? The telemetry data of the flight control center is difficult to locate the specific reason. Reproduction is even easier, and the repeated interviews with the car before the launch have not been exposed.
Then, there is only one most helpless way for astronauts to return to zero. This is a process that makes astronauts smell discolored, and it is also the attitude of Chinese astronauts to practice. From scratch to check the possible problems, one by one to verify the reproduction, hoping to solve the problem from the source, but half a year has passed, for the most fundamental cause of this failure, there is still no clear clue.
On April 16, 2018, the Bureau of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense released the basic cause of the failure, which was a problem with the hydrogen-oxygen engine (YF-77). However, what caused the YF-77 to stop suddenly, no one could give a definitive answer at the time. After a long night, the dawn finally broke, at the end of November of the same year, the YF-77 engine ushered in a 500-second long-distance test, accompanied by the full mixing combustion of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, releasing a huge heat wave to hit the ground, time passed by second by second, and suddenly, the local structure of the oxygen turbopump broke. Any fatal problem that arises during the test is a hard-won surprise!
After the failure of the ground interview car, the YF-77 development team ushered in the second zero, but this time there was a very clear goal, that is, the local structure of the oxygen turbopump. After a series of improvements, the time came to April 2019, and even though the researchers were confident, the oxygen turbopump still cracked at the last test run. The third time zeroing begins, and time once again enters samsara.
On December 27, the king of the Long March 5 Yaosan rocket returned and once again stepped into the journey of the universe. 908 days and nights, how many people for this night, the effort will eventually be condensed into a harvest. Academician Ouyang Ziyuan said in his speech: "We must seize the window of landing on Mars in 2020. "For more than two years, everyone has been holding their breath, and now that the Long Five have finally successfully returned to flight, it is time to show the world China's capabilities."
2020 is a big outbreak year for China's aerospace industry.
On June 23, the last networking satellite of Beidou-3 was successfully connected to the network, and the Beidou global satellite navigation system was officially completed.
On July 23, the Tianwen-1 Mars rover was launched by the Long March 5 Yao-4 rocket.
On November 24, Chang'e 5 was launched by the Long March 5 Yaowu rocket, and in the early morning of December 17, the Chang'e 5 returner carried lunar samples home safely, marking the successful completion of the third phase of China's Chang'e lunar exploration project "orbiting and falling back".
On April 29, 2021, the Tianhe core module of the Chinese space station was launched by the Long March 5B Yao-2 rocket, officially opening a new era of long-term residence of the Chinese space station.
Standing today and looking back on the past, I still sigh. When I returned home at the beginning of the New Year, I heard that Tianwen-1 was about to enter the orbit of Mars, and I couldn't help but send out a feeling of "Tianwen Tianyou hopes, and the success or failure of ten years is shared and prosperous". More than a decade has passed since Chang'e-1 was captured by the moon's gravitational field on November 5, 2007, and by February 10, 2021, when Tianwen-1 was captured by the Martian gravitational field. From the Earth-Moon system to the planetary system, every step is so difficult, one day, we can Chinese break through the solar system and get out of the shackles of the gravitational pull of the stars.
Tianwen-1 lander and Zhu Rong Mars rover
On May 15, 2021, under the attention of the whole world, the Tianwen-1 landing rover successfully made a soft landing on the utopian plains of Mars. With the successive return of video data, at this moment, we can finally say proudly: China is a real space power, deep space exploration, and yang Fan has set sail since then.