Toward a Power of Planetary Science from a Gaint of Deep Space Exploration

Subjects: Other Disciplines >> Synthetic discipline submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《中国科学院院刊》

万卫星 魏勇 郭正堂 徐义刚 潘永信

Abstract： It has been four hundred years since Galileo first used telescope to kick-start the scientific observation of the universe in 1609. In 1959, the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 arrived at the Moon for the first time in human’s history, which started the era of deep space exploration. Ten years after, the United States landed the first astronauts on the lunar surface during the historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969, which led to the born of planetary science. Looking back to the sixty-years’ history of human’s deep space explorations, there were two upsurges of exploration led by the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively. The Soviet Union was leading in the space race in the beginning but they went downhill later on, leaving them a country with strong deep space exploration program only to the past. In contrast, the United States became a country with strong deep space exploration program and has been a leader of the world in the planetary science field since then. Exploring the vast universe is all human being’s dream. As a growing country with rapid developing deep space exploration program, how China paves a way to build a strong planetray science program with China’s characteristics based on Chinese national situation? Here we look into the history, study the present status, and think of future, and we provide authors’ perspectives on this question: vigorously cultivate planetary science talents and realize science leading deep space exploration as soon as possible.

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