China's Mars Probe Tianwen-1 Travels Over 300 million km
The administration said in a statement that the spacecraft had been in good condition. By Tuesday morning, the robotic probe had flown 116 days in an Earth-Mars transfer trajectory toward the red planet, around 63.8 million km away from the Earth, it noted.
The spacecraft is programmed to reach the Martian gravitational field in February and then begin to prepare for landing, which is expected to take place in May. After the landing, it will release a rover to conduct scientific exploration.
Tianwen 1, the country's first independent Mars mission, was launched by a Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket on July 23 at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, opening the nation's planetary exploration program.
If everything goes according to schedule, the 5-metric ton probe, which consists of two major parts – the orbiter and the landing capsule, will travel more than 470 million km before getting captured by the Martian gravitational field in February, when it will be 193 million km away from Earth.
By now, the spacecraft has fulfilled three midcourse corrections and a deep-space orbital maneuver, according to the administration.
Before Tianwen 1, there had been 45 Mars exploration missions since October 1960, when the former Soviet Union launched the world's first Mars-bound spacecraft, and only 17 of them ended up successful.
In the second step in China's Mars exploration program, a larger probe will set off for Mars around 2030 to take samples and then return to the Earth, space officials have said.
(Source-http://www.cnsa.gov.cn)
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