The new images of the surface of the Red Planet will be used by Chinese scientists to plan their future missions.
Space presented a new series of images from representatives of the China National Space Administration and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, taken by the Tianwen-1 orbiter of the entire surface of Mars.
in 24News Breaker. Technology emerged telegraph channel. Subscribe so you don’t miss the latest and exciting news from the world of science!
In China, they demonstrated a new feat of their first device to fly to another planet. Tianwen-1 entered Mars orbit in February 2021 and has provided scientists with a lot of important scientific data during that time. But Chinese scientists showed the results of their work from November 2021 to July 2022. During that time, the spacecraft circled Mars 284 times and took 14,757 images of the planet’s surface.
All these images were processed and created from a general map of Mars, which is the projection of a sphere on a flat surface. In fact, World maps are created in the same way. This spherical map of Mars has a resolution of 76 meters per pixel.
According to Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China’s Mars exploration spacecraft, Tianwen-1 has returned very detailed color images of the Red Planet, which creates a very high-quality complete basemap of Mars. Chinese scientists plan to use this map to develop their next mission on this planet and will also share data with other countries.
In 2030, China plans to send the spacecraft to Mars to collect local rock samples and deliver them to Earth, and only images from Tianwen-1 will help determine the best place for landing.
During the presentation of a large-scale map of Mars, Zhang Rongqiao also gave new information about the fate of the Chinese rover Zhurong, who has been in sleep mode since December last year. Just like last time Focus The Chinese scientist has already written about this, again reporting that the device is covered with a huge layer of dust and does not receive enough solar energy to wake up from sleep mode. According to Zhang Rongqiao, this likely means that the rover will never resume its work on Mars.
Meanwhile, Chinese scientists have named 22 geographical objects on the Red Planet located near the Zhurong rover’s landing site. These names have already been adopted for use by the international scientific community.
China rover’s long hibernation
As already written Focus, in May 2022 last year, this spacecraft went into sleep mode. He did this to survive the harsh Martian winter, where the amount of solar energy decreased sharply. Also, winters on Mars are notorious for powerful dust storms that can significantly damage any device exploring the planet.
After the rover was unable to communicate with Earth for a long time in December, when it was supposed to wake up, Chinese scientists tried to find out what happened, as previously written. Focus.
And it was only at the end of April that China admitted that the rover’s solar panels were covered in a large layer of Martian dust, and that was the reason it was unable to wake up from sleep mode and send a signal back to Earth. Wrote Focus.
At the same time, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been working on Mars for 10 years, and scientists recently sent it an important software update. Now the rover will process information better and move faster as I wrote earlier Focus.
Source: Focus
Ashley Fitzgerald is an accomplished journalist in the field of technology. She currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the latest technology developments, Ashley’s writing provides readers with insightful analysis and unique perspectives on the industry.