Tag Archives: Tianwen1

Mars mission: Tianwen-1 sends back its first picture

This image shows seasonal flows in Valles Marineris on Mars, which are called Recurring Slope Lineae, or RSL. These Martian landslides appear on slopes during the spring and summer.

This artist’s illustration shows the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter as it orbits Mars. The orbiter detected a layer of glowing green oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took a selfie shortly before completing its steepest climb yet on Mars up the Greenheugh Pediment, which tilted the rover 31 degrees.

NASA’s Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama, including more than a thousand images and 1.8 billion pixels, of the Martian surface between November 24 and December 1, 2019.

The cloud in the center of the image is actually a dust tower that occurred in 2010 and was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The blue and white clouds are water vapor.

This perspective of Mars’ Valles Marineris hemisphere from July 9, 2013, is actually a mosaic comprising 102 Viking Orbiter images. At the center is the Valles Marineris canyon system, over 2,000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep.

NASA’s Curiosity rover took this selfie on October 11, 2019, in the “Glen Etive” region.

The InSight lander was imaged from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Is that cookies and cream on Mars? No, it’s just polar dunes dusted with ice and sand.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission captured this image of the Korolev crater, more than 50 miles across and filled with water ice, near the north pole.

A recent photo taken by the Curiosity rover shows its current location, known as “Teal Ridge.” The rover has been studying the clay-bearing unit in this region.

Cooled lava helped preserve a footprint of where dunes once moved across a southeastern region on Mars. But it also looks like the “Star Trek” symbol.

NASA’s InSight lander used a camera on its robotic arm to capture this sunset on Mars on April 25.

InSight’s seismometer recorded a “marsquake” for the first time on April 6, 2019.

A photo of a preserved river channel on Mars, taken by an orbiting satellite, with color overlaid to show different elevations. Blue is low and yellow is high.

This is NASA InSight’s first selfie on Mars. It displays the lander’s solar panels and deck. On top of the deck are its science instruments, weather sensor booms and UHF antenna.

Rovers can take selfies, too. This self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the Quela drilling location in the Murray Buttes area on lower Mount Sharp.

Mars is far from a flat, barren landscape. Nili Patera is a region on Mars in which dunes and ripples are moving rapidly. HiRISE, onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, continues to monitor this area every couple of months to see changes over seasonal and annual time scales.

What are blueberries doing on Mars? These small, mineral hematite-rich concretions are near Fram Crater, visited by NASA’s Opportunity rover in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches across. The view comes from the microscopic imager on Opportunity’s robotic arm, with color information added from the rover’s panoramic camera. These minerals suggests that Mars had a watery past.

Mars is known to have planet-encircling dust storms. These 2001 images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet’s appearance when haze raised by dust-storm activity in the south became globally distributed.

Curiosity took images on September 9, 2015, of Mount Sharp, a hematite-rich ridge, a plain full of clay minerals to create a composite and rounded buttes high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers of Mount Sharp suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago.

HiRISE captured layered deposits and a bright ice cap at the Martian north pole.

This image, combining data from two instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of the north polar region of Mars. The ice-rich polar cap is 621 miles across, and the dark bands in are deep troughs. To the right of center, a large canyon, Chasma Boreale, almost bisects the ice cap. Chasma Boreale is about the length of the United States’ famous Grand Canyon and up to 1.2 miles deep.

Although Mars isn’t geologically active like Earth, surface features have been heavily shaped by wind. Wind-carved features such as these, called yardangs, are common on the Red Planet. On the sand, the wind forms ripples and small dunes. In Mars’ thin atmosphere, light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the yardangs are sharp and dark.

From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover’s tracks leading up the north-facing slope of Knudsen Ridge, which forms part of the southern edge of Marathon Valley.

HiRISE took this image of a kilometer-size crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars in June 2014. The crater shows frost on all its south-facing slopes in late winter as Mars is heading into spring.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to obtain this view of an area with unusual texture on the southern floor of Gale Crater.

A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the HiRISE camera on November 19, 2013. The crater spans approximately 100 feet and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone. Because the terrain where the crater formed is dusty, the fresh crater appears blue in the enhanced color of the image, due to removal of the reddish dust in that area.

Opportunity used its panoramic camera to record this eastward horizon view on October 31, 2010. A portion of Endeavour Crater’s eastern rim, nearly 19 miles in the distance, is visible over the Meridiani Planum.

In this artist’s concept of NASA’s InSight lander on Mars, layers of the planet’s subsurface can be seen below and dust devils can be seen in the background.

The two largest quakes detected by NASA’s InSight appear to have originated in a region of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists previously spotted signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter.

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China’s Tianwen-1 Mars probe delivers its first haunting look at the planet

China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft sent back its first snapshot of Mars.


CNSA

It’s a busy month on Mars. Three spacecraft missions are closing in on the red planet. China’s Tianwen-1 is one of them, and it already has an eye on its new home in the solar system. The Chinese National Space Agency released Tianwen-1’s first view of Mars on Friday.

CNSA described the image as “the first snapshot from the Chinese craft” in a statement, and said it was captured from about 1.4 million miles (2.2 million kilometers) away. The stark black and white photo shows Mars against the dark backdrop of space.

CNSA previously released a spacecraft “selfie” in September 2020 showing Tianwen-1 on its long flight.

The Chinese spacecraft has been making some corrections to its trajectory to bring it neatly into orbit on Feb. 10. The mission is made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. It will spend some time traveling around Mars before attempting the harrowing landing part of the mission.

Joining Tianwen-1 in orbit will be NASA’s Perseverance mission and the United Arab Emirate’s Hope probe. Reaching orbit is a big deal for all of them, though NASA will the focus on Feb. 18 when it attempts to land the Perseverance rover on the surface.

Tianwen-1’s snapshot of Mars is dramatic not just for its view of the red planet, but for the hopes and goals it represents.

Follow CNET’s 2021 Space Calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.    

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China’s Tianwen-1 Mars probe shares first photo of red planet

China’s first interplanetary probe is now so close to Mars that its camera can make out craters across the red planet’s surface.

The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, a suite of robots launched by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) in July, has spent the last six months speeding through space. At just 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from its destination, the probe beamed back its very first photo: a black-and-white snapshot of Mars.

The CNSA released the picture on Friday. In a press release, the agency said that the probe had fired an engine as part of its fourth “orbital correction,” or adjustment of its path through space. Now Martian gravity should pull the mission into just the right orbit around the planet.

The five-ton probe is set to carry out a braking operation to slow its high-speed spaceflight and slip into orbit around Mars on February 10. Following that, the spacecraft will spend a couple months surveying a landing site at Utopia Planitia, a vast field of ancient volcanic rock.

The orbiter is supposed to drop a lander-rover combo to the planet’s surface in May, the CNSA said. If the rocket-powered descent goes smoothly, the lander will deploy a two-track ramp  for the rover to roll onto Martian soil. The rover’s radar system will help Chinese researchers seek out underground pockets of liquid water. (The orbiter, meanwhile, will continue circling the red planet and relaying data to Earth.)

Such ancient water reservoirs could be remnants of a time billions of years ago when Mars flowed with rivers, courtesy of a much thicker and protective atmosphere than exists today. During this era, Mars somewhat resembled Earth, and scientists think it may have hosted alien microbial life. Any underground pockets of water, shielded from the sun’s unfiltered radiation and the vacuum of space, might still harbor such species, if they exist.

If successful, Tianwen-1 will be the first Mars mission to send a spacecraft into orbit, drop a landing platform, and deploy a rover all in one expedition. It will also mark China’s first landing on another planet and help the nation prepare a future mission that might return a Martian rock or dirt sample to Earth in the late 2020s.

An illustration of China’s planned Mars Global Remote Sensing Orbiter and Small Rover mission, or HX-1. Here a rover is shown leaving a lander to explore the Martian surface.

Chinese State Administration of Science/Xinhua



As of Friday, the CNSA said Tianwen-1 is just about 1.1 million kilometers (680,000 miles) from its destination.

Two other missions which launched around the same time as Tianwen-1 — NASA’s Perseverance rover and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe — are also arriving at Mars in the next two weeks. All three missions are taking advantage of a window when Mars passes close to Earth, decreasing travel time and cost.

China attempted to send an orbiter to Mars in 2011, but the Russian spacecraft that was meant to carry it there stalled in Earth’s orbit and never left.

Tianwen-1 is the closest China has ever gotten to another planet. With luck — and the right engineering to weather a harrowing “seven minutes of terror” as it plunges toward Mars — it will reach the surface.

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China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission in photos

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(Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

A portion of Mars’ Utopia Planitia impact basin, as photographed by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. China’s Tianwen-1 Mars rover will touch down in a section of Utopia Planitia in 2021.

Full story: China chooses landing site for Tianwen-1 Mars rover

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(Image credit: CNSA)

A Long March 5 rocket was vertically transported to the launch area at China’s Wenchang Space Launch Center on July 17, 2020. Note the logos of the European (ESA), French (CNES), Argentine (CONAE) and Austrian (FFG) space agencies in addition to that of the China National Space Agency (CNSA).

Full story: China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission rolls out to launch pad (photos, video)

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Agency)

A Chinese Long March 5 rocket launches the China National Space Administration’s Tianwen-1 Mars rover, lander and orbiter from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island on July 23, 2020.

Full story: China launches ambitious Tianwen-1 Mars rover mission

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Agency)

A Chinese Long March 5 rocket launches the China National Space Administration’s Tianwen-1 Mars rover, lander and orbiter from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island on July 23, 2020.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Agency)

A Chinese Long March 5 rocket launches the China National Space Administration’s Tianwen-1 Mars rover, lander and orbiter from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island on July 23, 2020.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Agency)

The Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter, rover and lander separate from their Long March 5 rocket after a successful launch on July 23, 2020.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Agency)

This screenshot from a CCTV broadcast shows a depiction of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter-rover-lander after spacecraft separation and solar array deployment on July 23, 2020.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of China’s first Mars rover mission, Tianwen-1, on its way to the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of China’s first Mars rover mission, Tianwen-1, arriving in orbit at the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of China’s first Mars rover mission, Tianwen-1, landing on the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of China’s first Mars rover mission, Tianwen-1, landing on the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of China’s first Mars rover mission, Tianwen-1, landing on the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of China’s first Mars rover mission, Tianwen-1, at the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: CNSA)

An artist’s illustration of China’s first Mars rover Tianwen-1 on the Red Planet. 

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of China’s Tianwen-1 rover being deployed from the lander on the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: CCTV/China National Space Administration)

An artist’s concept of the Tianwen-1 lander on the Red Planet.

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(Image credit: James Head)

Diagram of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter.

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(Image credit: James Head)

Diagram of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars rover.

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NASA’s Perseverance, China’s Tianwen-1 and UAE’s Hope reach Mars this month

https://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/img/N4bLSt6wKVqHeLoo1E2juCpKk38=/filters:gifv()/2021/01/29/fa0a986a-305a-4cd7-8db8-0e5c03ddacbe/marsarrival1.gif

En route to Mars.


NASA/JPL-Caltech

July 2020 was a huge month for Mars. Taking advantage of its nearby position in orbit, three missions departed the Earth on a seven-month journey to the red planet. Now those spacecraft — NASA’s Perseverance rover, the Chinese space agency’s Tianwen-1 and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope — are arriving at their destination. They’re poised to uncover the secrets our celestial neighbor hides within its atmosphere and barren plains and may even reveal relics of ancient life on the planet’s surface. 

Although all three spacecraft will make it to orbit around Mars this month, NASA’s Perseverance (or “Percy”) gets to take center stage. It will be the only mission to land on the surface this month, with an expected arrival date of Feb. 18. Perseverance builds on an impressive history of interplanetary exploration, with its sibling rover Curiosity coming up on nine years on Mars, delivering breathtaking photographs and some puzzling data.

That’s not to take anything away from the UAE’s Hope, or Al Amal, and China’s Tianwen-1. Both spacecraft are expected to perform Mars orbital insertion, or MOI, maneuvers within a day of each other on Feb. 9 and Feb. 10, respectively. Hope will remain in orbit and analyze the Martian atmosphere, but Tianwen-1 will attempt something only achieved by two other nations: landing on Mars’ unfriendly surface. China is expected to release Tianwen-1’s lander and rover duo sometime in May. 

Here’s a recap of the journey to Mars and what we can expect this month.

First place

Every 26 months, the orbits of Earth and Mars line up in such a way that space agencies can take advantage of something known as a Hohmann transfer orbit.

“We do this kind of transfer orbit in order to use the least fuel,” James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist with Japanese space agency JAXA, told CNET last year. “It’s like passing a football to a striker, you’ve got to aim where they’re going to be.”

In July 2020, everything lined up perfectly, and the three missions were out of here. Some fast facts:

The cadence of launches means Hope will reach Mars first in February. It’s expected to perform its MOI on Feb. 9, slowing down from 75,000 miles per hour to just 11,200. At approximately 7:42 a.m. PT, the bus-length probe will arrive “at” Mars and will begin to transition to the science phase of the mission. The maneuver is totally autonomous, because communication doesn’t quite work as quickly as it does here on Earth — the interplanetary phone call has a more than 13-minute delay, so Hope will be flying on its own from a set of preset instructions.

Tianwen-1’s arrival is slightly more mysterious. China’s space agency doesn’t typically reveal a lot of information about its activities, even for a potentially history-making mission such as this. According to Chinese news service CCTV, it will be the second craft to enter orbit, on Feb. 10. 

Three spacecraft, seven months

Although the majority of the science will be performed when the spacecraft reach Mars, scientists and engineers have been testing the capability of their spacecraft on the cruise phase of the mission. The journey itself is a long one — covering about 300 million miles (~480 million kilometers) — and each agency has a chance to improve the trajectory of the craft for a perfect arrival. What else has been happening?

Last but not least

NASA’s Perseverance rover will touch down on Feb. 18. Though NASA’s got a good track record of landing on the red planet in the last few decades, there are no guarantees — Mars is hard. 

“Success is never assured,” said Allan Chen, engineering lead on the entry, descent and landing phase of the mission, during a NASA press conference on Jan. 27. “That’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built to the most dangerous site we’ve ever attempted to land on.”  

The space agency expects to have the best footage of landing ever, with a suite of cameras and a microphone ready to capture the entry, descent and landing. It’s the first time we’ll be able to listen to the sounds of a Martian landing, providing a completely new sensory experience for avid Mars fans. Sadly, there’s no way we’ll be able to watch live, as such, but NASA will provide coverage of the moment. We’ve got a comprehensive guide to Mars landing day and what you can expect. 

How to watch NASA’s Perseverance landing on Mars

If you’re looking to catch Perseverance rover’s touchdown on Feb. 18, we’ve got you covered and you can access the stream right here. And if you’re interested in all the other great celestial events and rocket launches, we recommend syncing your calendar with CNET’s Space Calendar — you’ll never miss a launch again.

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