China’s Tianwen-1 probe has beamed back a new video of its orbit around Mars, ahead of what will be a relatively busy few months of space traffic around the red planet. The video, released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), follows the probe’s first photo of Mars shared earlier this month, after it completed its roughly seven-month journey from Earth.
Tianwen-1 was launched on July 23, 2020 and is basically made up of several components, rather than just one spacecraft. On the one hand, there is the Orbiter, which is designed to provide a bird’s-eye view of Mars with a battery of sensors and instruments. It’s what has rendered images of the red planet so far.
The Rover, meanwhile, is designed to be sent to the surface of the planet. There, the tools will unfold such as a ground penetrating radar, magnetic field detector, multi-spectrum camera and surface link detector, to take measurements of the ground and what’s underneath. However, that process will not begin until May or June 2021, as the Orbiter must first collect information about a refined destination zone.
For that, the Orbiter will use its medium resolution camera – which has a resolution of about 100 meters from a track of about 250 miles – and the high resolution camera, which increases the resolution to less than 2 meters from that same distance. The CNSA’s new video is basically based on still images captured sequentially by the Engineering Survey Sub-System on the solar panel wing and tracking antenna, reports CCTV Plus, the China-backed media outlets, with a single shot at the 3 seconds for about half an hour.
The result is lower resolution than the images collected later to plan the Rover’s landing. In fact, the Engineering Survey Sub-System is actually intended to monitor the Orbiter itself, allowing for things like the deployment of the solar panels to be observed.
Still, it is enough to see a new look at Mars from the so far successful mission. According to the CNSA, the clip was captured when Tianwen-1 was about 400 kilometers from the planet’s surface at its closest point. It shows it is entering the elliptical orbit and some of the hardware is coming out of the Orbiter.
The Tianwen-1 Rover is a one-way trip and is not intended to return to the Orbiter or Earth. However – just as NASA plans to do with Perseverance, its own Mars rover currently underway – the CNSA wants to collect samples for future collection by another mission. That’s been proposed sometime in the 2030s where another spacecraft will be dispatched to collect the soil and rock samples that Tianwen-1 has stored.
Perseverance is the latest of three simultaneous projects to send spacecraft to Mars to arrive on the planet. The UAE spacecraft has already reached orbit.