Agence France-PresseFeb 15, 2021 14:05:41 IST
China’s space agency released video footage from their spacecraft orbiting Mars on Friday, two days after it successfully entered the planet’s orbit in Beijing’s latest advanced space mission. The video, released by the state-of-the-art CCTV broadcaster, shows the planet’s surface coming out of a black-and-white sky against the outside of the Tianwen-1, which went into orbit. ‘Red Planet Wednesday. White craters can be seen on the surface of the planet, which descends from white to black throughout the video while the probe flies over one Martian day, the official Xinhua news agency said.
This screenshot taken from a handheld video received from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on February 13, 2021 shows the view of Mars from the Tianwen-1 spacecraft in China as it orbits the planet in space on 12 February. China’s space agency released video footage from its spacecraft orbiting Mars on February 12, two days after it successfully entered the planet’s orbit in Beijing’s latest advanced space mission.
Image credit: CNSA / AFP
The five-ton Tianwen-1 – which translates as “Questions to Heaven” – incorporates a solar-powered Mars orbiter, lander and rover and was launched from southern China in July last year.
This is the latest step in Beijing’s space program, which aims to establish a crew spacecraft by 2022 and finally put an astronaut on the moon, and has opened a new outer space for the competition of SA-China.
Tianwen-1 launched around the same time as the U.S. competitive mission, and is expected to crash down on the planet’s surface in May.
Its success coincides with the UAE’s “Hope” probe also entering Mars orbit – making history as the first interplanetary mission in the Arab world.
Chinese scientists hope to land a 240-kilogram rover in May in Utopia, a major impact center on Mars. Its orbiter will last for a Martian year.
For the three-month study of the planet’s soil and atmosphere, the mission takes photographs, maps and looks for signs of a past life.
The probe has already returned the first image of Mars – a black-and-white image that showed geological features including the Schiaparelli crater and the Valles Marineris, a large piece of canyons on the Martian surface .
Mars has been a challenging target, with most missions since 1960, sent by Russia, Europe, Japan and India, ending in failure.
NASA’s permanence, which is expected to hit the Red Planet on Feb. 18, is the fifth rover to complete the orbit since 1997 – and they’ve all been American.