China on Monday released the first Mars global images obtained from its first Mars exploration mission, providing an improved quality base map for future scientific and exploration tasks on the Red Planet, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced at the opening ceremony of this year’s Space Day of China.
The color images, jointly issued by CNSA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, included an orthographic projection, Robinson projection, the Mercator projection, and azimuthal projection of the eastern and western hemispheres of Mars with a spatial resolution of 76 meters.
The image maps will provide an improved quality base map for Mars exploration projects and scientific research, the CNSA said, and data obtained by the Tianwen mission will make key contributions to humanity’s in-depth knowledge of the planet.
The medium-resolution camera onboard Tianwen-1, has performed 284 orbital remote sensing imaging from November 2021 to July 2022, so as to achieve global coverage of the Martian surface. Some 14,757 images have been acquired by the ground-based application system, which were then processed to obtain the global color image map of Mars.
What’s more, China’s research teams have identified a large number of geographical entities near the landing site of Tianwen through high-resolution images, and the International Astronomical Union has named 22 of them, according to relevant rules, after villages in China, with historical and cultural values and a population of less than 100,000. Through this way, China’s presence is permanently engraved on Mars’ surface.
Tianwen-1, China’s first Mars mission probe, embarked on its journey on July 23, 2020, and after 202 days of travel, it arrived at the Mars orbits.
On May 15, 2021, the land rover Zhurong landed in designated spot on the Martian surface and started its trek. It has completed its 90-Martian-day scientific exploration task and kept working for another 268 Martian days, and remains in hibernation mode.
As of June 29, 2022, the Mars orbiter has carried out global remote sensing for over 1,000 days, and it is still carrying on its mission in fine conditions.
China’s first Mars mission, which was tasked to achieve Mars orbiting, landing and roving in one go, has been completed successfully.
The 13 payloads carried by the mission have accumulated 1800GB of scientific data and formed standard data products.
Over the past two years, Tianwen-1 has obtained first-hand detection data and achieved notable scientific research results, which analysts believed would be continued with further multi-dimensional exploration missions being carried out.
(Global Times)
