#utopia planitia

Tianwen 1 is named after a famous Chinese poem and translates roughly to “Heavenly questions” or “Questions from the sky”. This spacecraft represents China’s first attempt to launch a space probe to Mars without a partner (such as Russia, who they previously worked with on the failed Phobos-Grunt mission). This mission is ambitious. Despite not having successfully put a spacecraft in orbit of Mars before, this spacecraft contains 3 components: an orbiting spacecraft, a lander, and a rover. If successful, this will be the first time that any space agency has put all 3 of these components together in a single planetary mission. There are about a dozen scientific instruments altogether. The orbiting spacecraft carries several cameras that will image the surface at varying resolutions, with a highest resolution of 2 meters per pixel (about a factor of 10 lower than the 0.3 meters per pixel of the HiRISE camera). It also carries a spectrometer which will gather mineralogical information about the surface and a tool to measure Mars’s magnetic field. The rover contains cameras, a weather monitoring instrument, a mineralogical tool, and a ground penetrating radar that will allow it to search for ice deposits beneath the surface. The targeted landing site is in Utopia Planitia, a broad area of plains in Mars’s northern hemisphere. In the 1970s, the American Viking 2 spacecraft landed successfully in this area and monitored conditions including yearly frosts, as well as measuring the atmosphere and photographing some of the surrounding rocks. This would be the first rover landed in this area. As of now, the launch is scheduled for July 23 from Hainan Island, with an arrival at Mars in early 2021 and a 1 year planned mission. -JBB Image credit and reference: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1148-6 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Global_Remote_Sensing_Orbiter_and_Small_Rover_at_IAC_Bremen_2018_09.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-1#/media/File:Mars_Global_Remote_Sensing_Orbiter_and_Small_Rover_(2020).png