A Chinese spacecraft has acquired images of the entire planet Mars, including images of its south pole, which contains large reserves of water.
Tianwen-1 also sent high-resolution images of the edge of the vast Maunder crater, as well as a top-down view of the 18,000-meter (59,055-foot) Ascraeus Mons, a large shielded volcano first detected more than five decades. does.
Other photographs include the 4,000-kilometer Valles Marineris canyon and the impact craters of the highlands north of Mars known as Arabia Terra.
The unmanned Tianwen-1 arrived on Mars in February 2021 on the country’s inaugural mission there. Since then, a robotic rover has been deployed to the surface while an orbit was examining the planet from space.
Among the images taken from space were the first photographs of China from the Martian South Pole, where almost all of the planet’s water resources are blocked.
In 2018, an orbiting spacecraft operated by the European Space Agency had discovered water under the ice of the planet’s south pole.
Locating groundwater is key to determining the life potential of the planet, as well as providing a permanent resource for any human exploration there.
- Reuters, with additional edition by George Russell
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George Russell
George Russell is a Hong Kong-based freelance writer and publisher living in Asia since 1996. His work has been published in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, New York Post, Variety, Forbes and South China. Morning Post. .