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BEIJING (Reuters) – An unmanned Chinese spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Mars on Wednesday after a six-and-a-half-month journey from Earth, the Chinese space agency said, in the country’s first independent mission to the red planet. .
The robotic probe carried out a 15-minute power-up of its thrusters at 7:52 p.m. Beijing time (1152 GMT), the China National Space Administration said in a statement, slowing the spacecraft to a speed which could be caught by the tug. of the gravity of Mars.
In May or June, Tianwen-1 will attempt to land a capsule carrying a 240 kg rover in a rapid seven-minute descent to a massive plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars known as Utopia Planitia.
If the landing is successful, the solar-powered rover will scan the Martian surface for 90 days, study its soil, and look for signs of ancient life, including any underground water and ice, using ground-penetrating radar.
Tianwen-1, or “Questions to Heaven,” named after a Chinese poem written two millennia ago, is China’s first independent mission to the planet after a probe launched jointly with Russia failed to leave Earth’s orbit in 2011. .
The probe is one of three arriving on Mars this month. The Hope spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates successfully entered the planet’s orbit on Tuesday. Hope will not make a landing, but will orbit Mars collecting data on its climate and atmosphere.
Tianwen-1 will also have an orbiter component that will survey the Martian atmosphere with a range of instruments including a high-resolution imaging camera.
The two probes join six other Mars-orbiting spacecraft launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and India.
On the United States’ most ambitious Mars mission, the 1-ton Perseverance probe is expected to arrive on February 18. You will immediately attempt a landing in a rocky depression with steep cliffs called Jezero Crater.
On the surface, Perseverance will collect rock samples for recovery on a future mission. Two other NASA rovers, Curiosity and InSight, are currently operating on the planet’s surface.
Perseverance will also try to deploy a small helicopter called Ingenuity in the fine Martian atmosphere.
(Reporting by Liangping Gao and Ryan Woo; written by Tom Daly; edited by Jason Neely and Alexandra Hudson)
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