China’s space agency is releasing video footage two days after the Mars probe successfully entered the orbit of the red planet.
China’s space agency has released video footage of its spacecraft orbiting Mars two days after successfully entering the planet’s orbit in Beijing’s most recent ambitious space mission.
In the video released by state broadcaster CCTV, the planet’s surface becomes visible from a pitch black sky against the outside of Tianwen-1, which entered orbit the Red Planet on Wednesday.
White craters are visible on the surface of the planet, fading from white to black through the video as the probe flies on a Mars day, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The 5,000 kilogram Tianwen-1 – translated as “questions to the sky” – includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a solar-powered rover, which was launched from southern China last July.
This is the latest step in Beijing’s space program, which aims to build a crewed space station by 2022 and eventually bring an astronaut to the moon, and has opened a new alien arena for competition between the US and China.
Past life signs
Tianwen-1 launched around the same time as a rival U.S. mission and is expected to land on the planet’s surface in May.
Success comes the same week that the United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe also successfully entered Mars orbit and made history as the first interplanetary mission in the Arab world.
Chinese scientists hope to land a 240-kilogram rover in May in Utopia, a huge impact basin on Mars. Its orbiter will last a Martian year.
For the three-month survey of the planet’s soil and atmosphere, the mission will take photos, map maps, and look for signs of past lives.
The probe has already sent back its first image of Mars – a black and white photo that showed geological features such as the Schiaparelli Crater and Valles Marineris, a huge stretch of canyons on the Martian surface.
Mars has proven to be a challenging target. Most of the missions sent from Russia, Europe, Japan and India since 1960 have failed.
NASA’s persistence, slated to land on the Red Planet on February 18, will be the fifth rover to complete the journey since 1997 – and all of them have been American so far.
