China’s Tianwen 1 robot probe entered orbit above Mars’ polar regions on Monday and moved closer to the red planet, the China National Space Administration said.
The spacecraft activated its 3,000-tonne propulsion engine at 17:00 to carry out an orbital maneuver to enter the pole with a perigee about 265 kilometers above the red planet, the government said in a brief statement. said.
Subsequently, the probe will perform several lane adjustment operations to move itself into a parking lane.
In the parking lot, it will make observations and investigations about the predetermined landing site.
Before the latest maneuver, Tianwen 1 traveled to an elliptical Mars orbit with a perigee of about 400 km after his arrival Wednesday night in Mars’ gravitational field and became the first Chinese spacecraft to reach the planet.
Tianwen 1, the country’s first independent Mars mission, was launched on July 23, 2020 by a long-range 5-carrier rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan Province, launching the country’s planetary reconnaissance program.
The 5-metric ton of probe, which consists of two main parts – the orbit and the landing capsule – flew 202 days and about 475 million km on its journey to Mars. Its average flight speed was about 100,000 km per hour.
During its journey, the spacecraft made four mid-range corrections and a deep-space maneuver to make sure it was always aimed precisely at Mars.
The ultimate goal of the Tianwen 1 mission is to land a rover on the southern part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia – a large plain in Utopia, the largest recognized impact basin in the solar system – in May or June – to conduct scientific investigations .
Tianwen 1 is the world’s 46th Mars exploration mission since October 1960, when the former Soviet Union launched the first Mars-bound spacecraft. Only 18 of these missions were successful.
This article originally appeared on China Daily and was reproduced with permission.