China’s new Mars images show off the country’s robust (but secretive) space program
Stefanie Waldek / 12:34 PM CDT July 1, 2022
With a $24 billion budget and dozens of active, high-profile missions, it’s not surprising that NASA is the most visible of the dozens of government space agencies in the world. But China’s space program is a rapidly developing superpower that, whether it’s due to political tensions or the government’s careful control of information, doesn’t often get its fair share of attention.
Just this week, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) released a series of high-resolution images of Mars taken by its Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which arrived at the Red Planet in February 2021 and has been orbiting it ever since. Over the course of more than 1,300 orbits, Tianwen-1 has photographed the entire planet in extreme detail, from the icy south pole to the 2,485-mile-long Valles Marineris canyon to the 59,055-foot-tall shield volcano Ascraeus Mons.
While the U.S. has the reliable Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft have imaged the planet over the years, the full-surface survey by China’s program will be valuable to scientists and colony planners across the world if the country releases the imagery widely. But this is just the latest success of a thriving space program that has ambitious goals over the next five years — and it might not even be its most impressive one.
The fact that Tianwen-1 even made it to Mars is remarkable, as it was China’s first solo interplanetary mission. (China participated in a failed joint mission with Russia, Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1, which launched in 2011 but did not leave Earth orbit.) Overall, Mars missions, from flybys to orbiters to landers, have about a 50% success rate, according to NASA.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/01/chinas-new-mars-pictures-tianwen-1/