A top Chinese space official announced Monday that the nation is on track to return rocks from Mars' surface two years before NASA and the European Space Agency are expected to work together to do the same thing.
Sun Zezhou, the principal designer of China's first Mars mission Tianwen 1, announced in a speech honoring Nanjing University's 120th anniversary (via South China Morning Post) that China is prepared to deploy two spacecraft by the year 2031 to carry out the Mars rock retrieval.
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