Cina Tianwen-1 probe has sent back its first picture of Mars, according to the Chinese space agency.
Tianwen-1, whose name means “Quest for Heavenly Truth,” sent back a black and white picture of the red planet, which was taken when the probe was around 2.2 million kilometers away from Mars, the CSA said.
Launched in July last year, the probe is China’s first mission to Mars. Tianwen-1 will orbit the planet before landing a rover on the surface, with the hope that it can gather important information about the Martian soil, geological structure, environment, atmosfera, and search for signs of water.
Photos: The best moments on Mars
This image shows seasonal flows in Valles Marineris on Mars, which are called Recurring Slope Lineae, or RSL. These Martian landslides appear on slopes during the spring and summer.
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This artist’s illustration shows the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter as it orbits Mars. The orbiter detected a layer of glowing green oxygen in Mars’ atmosfera.
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took a selfie shortly before completing its steepest climb yet on Mars up the Greenheugh Pediment, which tilted the rover 31 degrees.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama, including more than a thousand images and 1.8 billion pixels, of the Martian surface between November 24 e dicembre 1, 2019.
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The cloud in the center of the image is actually a dust tower that occurred in 2010 and was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The blue and white clouds are water vapor.
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This perspective of Mars’ Valles Marineris hemisphere from July 9, 2013, is actually a mosaic comprising 102 Viking Orbiter images. At the center is the Valles Marineris canyon system, al di sopra di 2,000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover took this selfie on October 11, 2019, nel “Glen Etive” region.
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The InSight lander was imaged from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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Is that cookies and cream on Mars? No, it’s just polar dunes dusted with ice and sand.
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The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission captured this image of the Korolev crater, più di 50 miles across and filled with water ice, near the north pole.
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A recent photo taken by the Curiosity rover shows its current location, conosciuto come “Teal Ridge.” The rover has been studying the clay-bearing unit in this region.
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Cooled lava helped preserve a footprint of where dunes once moved across a southeastern region on Mars. But it also looks like the “Star Trek” symbol.
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NASA’s InSight lander used a camera on its robotic arm to capture this sunset on Mars on April 25.
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InSight’s seismometer recorded a “marsquake” for the first time on April 6, 2019.
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A photo of a preserved river channel on Mars, taken by an orbiting satellite, with color overlaid to show different elevations. Blue is low and yellow is high.
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This is NASA InSight’s first selfie on Mars. It displays the lander’s solar panels and deck. On top of the deck are its science instruments, weather sensor booms and UHF antenna.
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Rovers can take selfies, pure. This self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the Quela drilling location in the Murray Buttes area on lower Mount Sharp.
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Mars is far from a flat, barren landscape. Nili Patera is a region on Mars in which dunes and ripples are moving rapidly. HiRISE, onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, continues to monitor this area every couple of months to see changes over seasonal and annual time scales.
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What are blueberries doing on Mars? These small, mineral hematite-rich concretions are near Fram Crater, visited by NASA’s Opportunity rover in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches across. The view comes from the microscopic imager on Opportunity’s robotic arm, with color information added from the rover’s panoramic camera. These minerals suggests that Mars had a watery past.
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Mars is known to have planet-encircling dust storms. Queste 2001 images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet’s appearance when haze raised by dust-storm activity in the south became globally distributed.
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Curiosity took images on September 9, 2015, of Mount Sharp, a hematite-rich ridge, a plain full of clay minerals to create a composite and rounded buttes high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers of Mount Sharp suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago.
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HiRISE captured layered deposits and a bright ice cap at the Martian north pole.
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This image, combining data from two instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of the north polar region of Mars. The ice-rich polar cap is 621 miles across, and the dark bands in are deep troughs. To the right of center, a large canyon, Chasma Boreale, almost bisects the ice cap. Chasma Boreale is about the length of the United States’ famous Grand Canyon and up to 1.2 miles deep.
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Although Mars isn’t geologically active like Earth, surface features have been heavily shaped by wind. Wind-carved features such as these, called yardangs, are common on the Red Planet. On the sand, the wind forms ripples and small dunes. In Mars’ thin atmosphere, light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the yardangs are sharp and dark.
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From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover’s tracks leading up the north-facing slope of Knudsen Ridge, which forms part of the southern edge of Marathon Valley.
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HiRISE took this image of a kilometer-size crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars in June 2014. The crater shows frost on all its south-facing slopes in late winter as Mars is heading into spring.
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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to obtain this view of an area with unusual texture on the southern floor of Gale Crater.
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A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the HiRISE camera on November 19, 2013. The crater spans approximately 100 feet and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone. Because the terrain where the crater formed is dusty, the fresh crater appears blue in the enhanced color of the image, due to removal of the reddish dust in that area.
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Opportunity used its panoramic camera to record this eastward horizon view on October 31, 2010. A portion of Endeavour Crater’s eastern rim, quasi 19 miles in the distance, is visible over the Meridiani Planum.
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In this artist’s concept of NASA’s InSight lander on Mars, layers of the planet’s subsurface can be seen below and dust devils can be seen in the background.
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The two largest quakes detected by NASA’s InSight appear to have originated in a region of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists previously spotted signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter.
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The unmanned probe is around 184 million km from Earth and 1.1 million km from Mars, the CSA said Friday, adding that the craft had flown some 197 days and more than 465 million kilometers to reach the planet.
Tianwen-1 conducted its fourth orbital correction on Friday evening as the spacecraft prepares to arrive in orbit around February 10, where it will “brake” to slow down and be captured by the planet’s gravity, secondo l'agenzia.
According to the scientific team behind Tianwen-1, the probe is “going to orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter.”
“No planetary missions have ever been implemented in this way,” the team said in a carta released in July.
Tianwen-1 was one of three Mars missions that launched last July, along with NASA’s Perseverance rover and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Probe.
All three missions launched around the same time due to an alignment between Mars and the Earth on the same side of the sun, making for a more efficient journey to the red planet.
