DM Monitoring
BEIJING: China’s Tianwen 1 Mars probe carried out its second mid-course correction maneuver on Sunday night, according to the China National Space Administration.
The robotic spacecraft ran its four 120-Newton thrusters for 20 seconds around 11 pm after receiving control signals from its ground controllers, the administration said in a statement on Monday morning.
By Monday morning, Tianwen 1 had travelled 160 million kilometers in an Earth-Mars transfer trajectory toward the red planet, and was nearly 19 million km away from the Earth.
The administration added the spacecraft was in good condition.
China launched Tianwen 1, the country’s first independent Mars mission, on July 23 at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, opening the nation’s planetary exploration program.
On July 27, the probe sent back a picture of Earth and the moon, which was taken by its optical navigation sensor when it was about 1.2 million km away from Earth at the time.
The picture is the first image from the spacecraft that has been made public.
It made its first mid-course correction on Aug 2 when it was about 3 million km away from the Earth.
If everything goes according to schedule, the 5-metric ton Tianwen 1, which consists of an orbiter and landing capsule, will travel more than 470 million km before getting captured by Mars’ gravitational field in February.
The mission’s ultimate goal is to soft-land a rover around May 2021 on the southern part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia — a large plain within Utopia, the largest recognized impact basin on Mars and in the solar system — to make scientific surveys.
