China ‘s uncrewed Tianwen-1 spacecraft has circled Mars more than a thousand times. In its journey, it has captured an impressive series of photographs that cover the entire planet and now we can enjoy those high-resolution images of Mars , whether from the Martian South Pole, where almost all the planet’s water resources are locked up, from the Valles Canyon 4,000-kilometre-long marineris or the impact craters of Arabia Terra, a highland region in northern Mars.
Tianwen-1 is the name of the robotic spacecraft to Mars that actually consists of six separate pieces of equipment: an orbiter, two deployable cameras, a lander, a remote camera, and the Zhurong rover. Tian-wen means “questions to heaven” in Chinese.
Departure: July 23, 2020
China’s Tianwen-1 successfully arrived at the Red Planet in February 2021 on China’s maiden mission to this neighboring planet . The feat made China the second country, after the US, to have successfully carried out a Martian landing.
Since then, a robotic vehicle has been deployed on the surface while an orbiter surveyed the planet from space. The Zhurong rover also took a photo of the surface, which descended to the planet’s surface as part of the Tianwen-1 mission on May 22, 2021. Zhurong continued its exploration missions and has roamed the surface of Mars for a total 1,921.5 meters.
(The rover went into sleep mode on May 18 due to extreme cold and harsh sand and dust weather at its landing area versus Mars winter. It is expected to resume operation around December 2022 when the landing area of Zhurong enter in early spring and environmental conditions improve).
mission milestones
The probe traveled a total of 475 million kilometers and performed several trajectory maneuvers before entering Martian orbit on February 10, 2021.
The Tianwen-1 mission has successfully mapped the entire Red Planet, capturing images ranging from surface features, canyons, and craters to the poles, after circling the planet more than 1,300 times (1,344 times). ) in a space of just over a year.
The images of the south pole of Mars are the first taken by the Chinese spacecraft, according to Chinese state media through a press release. Tianwen-1 also sent back high-resolution images of the rim of the 91-kilometre Maunder crater in the Southern Highlands of Mars. It has also captured a top-down view of the 18,000-meter Ascraeus Mons , a large shield volcano first detected by NASA’s Mariner 9 spacecraft more than five decades ago.
After two years of operation and exploration of the planet by the Tianwen-1 Mars probe, the 13 pieces of scientific payload installed on the probe have obtained 1,040 gigabytes of original scientific data. Scientific data from research on Mars will be made available to scientists around the world at an appropriate time, and scientists can request research on the data to jointly promote mankind’s exploration of the universe, the National Space Administration said. of China (CNSA).
Referencia: China National Space Administration
