China’s Tianwen – 1 probe sent back a new video of its orbit around Mars ahead of a relatively busy few months of space travel around the red planet. The video, released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), follows the first photo of Mars, which was shared earlier this month, after completing its approximately seven-month journey from Earth.
Tianwen-1 was launched on 23 July 2020 and in fact consists of several components rather than just a single spacecraft. On one side there is the Orbiter, which is designed to give a bird flight over Mars with a battery of sensors and instruments. This is what has so far yielded footage of the red planet.
The Rover, meanwhile, was designed to be sent to the surface of the planet. There, it will unfold tools such as a ground penetrating radar, magnetic field detector, multispectrum camera and surface connection detector to read the ground measurements and what is underneath. However, the process will only begin in May or June 2021, as the Orbiter must first gather information about a refined target landing zone.
For that, the Orbiter will use its medium-resolution camera – with a resolution of about 328 feet from about a 250-mile orbit – and the high-resolution camera, which increases the resolution to less than 7 feet from the same distance. The new video from the CNSA actually relies on still photos taken sequentially by the Sub-System Engineering Survey on the solar panel wing and tracking antenna, reports the CCTV Plus media, CCTV Plus, with one shot once every 3 seconds for about a half an hour.
The result is a lower resolution than the images that will be collected later to plan the Rover landing. The sub-system for engineering survey is actually meant to monitor the Orbiter itself so that things like the deployment of the solar panels can be observed.
Yet it is enough to see a new view of Mars from the hitherto successful mission. According to the CNSA, the clip was captured when Tianwen-1 was about 250 miles from the planet’s surface at its nearest point. It shows how it enters elliptical orbit, and some of the hardware coming from the Orbiter.
Tianwen-1’s Rover is destined for a single trip, and is not designed to return to the Orbiter or Earth. However, the CNSA intends to collect samples for future collection by another mission, just as NASA wants to do with Perseverance, its own Mars rover currently underway. It is proposed in the 2030s, where a further spacecraft will be sent to capture the soil and rock samples that Tianwen-1 stored.
Perseverance will be the last of three simultaneous projects to send spacecraft to Mars to reach the planet. The UAE’s spacecraft has already reached its orbit.