China says it has successfully put its Tianwen-1 mission in orbit around Mars on 10 Feb 2021.
It's the first time the country has managed to get a spacecraft to the Red Planet and comes a day after the United Arab Emirates accomplished the same feat.
Tianwen-1, or "Questions to Heaven", comprises an orbiter and a rover and it is China's first Artificial Mars Satellite.
Engineers will bide their time before despatching the wheeled robot to the surface but the expectation is that this will happen in May or June.
Wednesday's orbit insertion underlines again the rapid progress China's space programme is making.
It follows December's impressive mission to retrieve rock and soil samples from Earth's Moon - by any measure a very complex undertaking.
This milestone makes China as the sixth entity to get a probe to Mars and joining the United States, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, India and the United Arab Emirates.
No comments:
Post a Comment