China has just made story as its first foray to the Red Planet has successfully reached Mars , making it the second craft in as many day to get there . Yesterday , theUnited Arab Emirates ’ Hopeprobe successfully entered orbit around Mars . It ’s a in use week for Mars , as NASA ’s Perseverance rover is due to come next week .
Tianwen-1 is an exciting exploratory combo , consisting of an satellite , a lander , and a rover . The lander - rover wo n’t be sent down to the surface immediately , however . The China National Space Administration ( CNSA ) is kick the bucket to look for the optimal atmospheric conditions . The landing place is expected to take place in May this year , and is the risky part of the journey .
If successful , China will become only the 2d land to land and deploy an explorative probe on Mars . Only the United States has accomplish that so far . The USSR ’s Mars 3 and the British Beagle 2 are believe to have safely shore but did not work on arrival . TheEuropean Space Agency ’s Schiaparelli landerand NASA ’s Mars Polar Lander both crash into the major planet on landing place . In fact , roughly half of all charge sent to Mars have betray so far , so NASA remains the only space agency tohaveoperated aspacecrafton the surface .
The orbiter portion of Tianwen-1 is designed to study the seeable geology of Mars and the weak magnetosphere that surrounds the planet . It is equip with a high - resolving power photographic camera that can snap image with a resolution of about 2 meters ( 6.6 human foot ) from its field , which is 400 kilometers ( 250 miles ) from the reason . These wo n’t be as sharp as NASA ’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’sHiRISE , but to be fair Tianwen-1 is further away from the Red Planet .
The lander - rover duo is designed free-base on thesuccess of Chang’e-4 . That mission was the first soft - landing on the far side of the Moon , a great winner for CNAS back in 2018 . The Tianwen-1 lander will relate down in Utopia Planitia , a region already known in terms of automatic exploration . That ’s where NASA ’s Viking 2 landed in 1976 . This localisation is also exciting because NASA discoveredlarge ice depositsthere from orbit .
An exciting instrument on the deputation is a ground - fall into place radar that will deliver a detailed map up to 100 cadence ( 330 feet ) below the Martian surface . Landers have over the last 50 years have literally only scraped the surface of the planet . This work will ply even more item about Mars .
The name Tianwen-1 come from an ancient Chinese poem write by Qu Yuan ( ~340 - 278 BCE ) . It translates as “ Questions to the Heavens ” and hopefully the mission will provide solution to the many uncertainties we still have about Mars .
Next week , it ’s NASA ’s turn to take the Martian spotlight . The Perseverance bird of passage and its small helicopter fellow traveller , Ingenuity , are expected to land on February 18 . Do n’t vex , we ’ll keep you updated on that too
