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The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has published four photos of Mars captured during the Tianwen-1 Mars mission. The Tianwen-1 probe released a camera that captured photos of the orbiter above Mars. It’s a unique and impressive view and the first full photo of the orbiter in space.
As of now, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft is around 350 million kilometers (217 million miles) from Earth. Since launching in July 2020, the spacecraft has traveled 475 million km (295 million mi) and entered Mars’s orbit in February 2021. In March, we published the first images that the CNSA shared from the mission. Those shots showed fantastic detail, although the new images provide neat context and show off Mars’s north pole.
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A landing capsule with the Zhurong rover was launched by the probe landed on Mars last May, making China the second country, after the United States, to successfully land on Mars. We saw the first photos from the rover last June. A future mission, Tianwen-2, aims to collect samples from the Martian surface and return them to Earth.
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| Mars’s north pole |
So far, the Tianwen-1 mission has transmitted nearly 540GB of data back to mission controllers at the CNSA. The spacecraft is still in good conditions so it will continue to perform research and deliver data back to Earth.
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To learn more about the Tianwen-1 Mars mission, visit the China National Space Administration website.
All images courtesy of the China National Space Administration