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Political gains only as China goes along for the ride to Mars

China joined the Russian Mars project early this week for political rather than technological reasons, say experts.

A scientist working for the nation's deep space exploration programmes in the China Academy of Space Technology said yesterday that Russia's core space technologies were strictly off-limits for the Chinese team.

'It is not easy to approximate the significance after you strip off political considerations,' said the expert who refused to be named.

His comments come after a Xinhua report yesterday that an agreement between the China National Space Administration and the Russian Federal Space Agency was signed on Monday to boost space co-operation between the two countries.

According to the agreement, signed on the first day of President Hu Jintao's three-day visit to Russia, a Chinese-made satellite will be launched with a Russian spacecraft in 2009 destined for Mars and its moon Phobos.

Expert on Russian affairs Wang Shicai said the agreement was a victory for Chinese diplomacy.

Professor Wang, a director of the Russian Institute at the Jilin Academy of Social Science, said western countries had dominated outer space since the cold war ended.

Co-operation between China and Russia would stimulate European Union member states to seek further co-operation with China in outer space, he said.

'Things begin to evolve along a good direction, even the US may be interested in co-operation one day.'

China has joined the European Commission's Galileo global satellite navigation system which is expected to be launched next year.

Co-operation with the US has also been sought since the late 1960s but has been denied because the US has considered China technologically incompetent.

The international assessment of China's ability was reviewed in January when the Chinese military conducted an anti-missile test, in which a ground-based missile was deployed to hit and demolish one of the nation's ageing satellites circling more than 800km from Earth in space.

The Russian project aims to send a spacecraft to the Martian moon of Phobos. The spacecraft will collect and return to Earth with soil samples.

The South China Morning Post reported on Monday that a system used to grind and filter soil and pebbles on the Phobos surface will be developed by a Hong Kong Polytechnic University team led by the university's industrial and systems engineering professor Yung Kai-leung and his doctorate student and robotics specialist Peter Weiss from Germany.

Along its way to Phobos, the space craft, called Phobos Explorer, will drop a Chinese-made satellite to orbit Mars.

The Chinese satellite will survey the Martian landscape, detect and analyse surface constituents, atmosphere and the presence of water in the planet's shadowy areas, according to an internal report prepared by the Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defence.

Distant neighbours

The Sino-Russian mission to survey Mars and Phobos

Distance varies between 56 million km and 372 million km

Phobos (pictured) is a heavily cratered body thought to be composed of rock and ice. It is believed to be a captured asteroid and is closer to its primary planet than any other moon in the solar system, orbiting 9,000 km above the surface. Mars' other moon, Deimos, orbits 23,000 km above its surface

Phobos

'Fear' in Greek

Discovered: 1877

Diameter: 22.2km

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