China says it has successfully placed its Tianwen-1 mission in orbit around Mars.
This is the first time the country has managed to get a spacecraft to the Red Planet and a day after the United Arab Emirates achieved the same feat.
Tianwen-1, or ‘Questions to Heaven’, consists of a track and a rover.
Engineers will send off their time before sending the wheel robot to the surface, but it is expected to happen in May or June.
Wednesday’s insertion of the orbit again underscores the rapid progress that China’s space program is making.
This follows the impressive mission of December to retrieve rock and soil samples from Earth’s moon – to some extent a very complex undertaking.
The mission of Tianwen-1, especially the surface element, will be no less challenging.
The five-ton space stack, consisting of an orbit and a rover, was launched from Wenchang spaceport in July and traveled nearly half a billion km to meet the Red Planet.
Engineers planned a 14-minute brake burn on the orbit of the 3,000 newton propeller, with the expectation that it would reduce the speed to 23 km / s sufficiently to capture Mars’ gravity.
The maneuver is automatic; it had to be. Radio assignments currently take 11 minutes to traverse the 190 million km that now separate Earth and Mars.
It should have placed Tianwen-1 in an initial large ellipse that comes as close as 400 km from the surface and up to 180,000 km.
It will be finished over time to become stricter and more circularized.
In contrast to Emiratis’ live TV coverage on Tuesday, China chose to report the orbital deployment to Mars only after it has taken place.
However, it was clear early on that events were going as they should, as amateur radio enthusiasts could listen to Tianwen-1’s signals, and they could see that every milestone in the maneuver was being reached.
China follows the strategy that the Americans used in the mid-1970s for their successful Viking landers. The idea then was to first make an orbit and only later send a robot to the surface.
A temporary exploration period follows now, but Tianwen-1’s primary choice for a touch is a flat plain within the Utopia impact basin just north of Mars’ equator.
The rover, which has yet to be named, looks a lot like the American space agency (Nasa)’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers from the 2000s. It weighs about 240 kg and is powered by expandable solar panels.
A long mast carries cameras to take photos and help with navigation; five additional tools will help assess the minerals of local rocks and search for any water ice.
An important experiment will be the ground penetrating radar, which should be able to observe geological layers at many depths of depth.
However, this surface investigation is actually only half of the mission, because the orbit that the rover observed will also study the planet using a series of seven remote sensing instruments.
Like previous satellites, this spacecraft will observe the properties of the high atmosphere and investigate the structures and composition of the surface. High and medium resolution cameras should produce impressive photos.
Tinawen-1 is one of three missions arriving at Mars in February.
The UAE probe from the UAE made it safely into orbit on Tuesday. Next week, Nasa will try to put another of its big robbers on the surface.