Intriguingly, the CNSA also acknowledged some of its failures in the white paper it noted that only 183 out of more than 400 launch attempts between 20 were successful. In January 2022, the administration published a white paper titled “China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective,” sharing both achievements since 2016 and plans for the next five years. Image Credits: CNSA via Reutersīut with so much success under its belt, the CNSA is becoming more forthcoming about its plans. The south pole of Mars, as photographed by China’s Tianwen-1. (NASA, for instance, almost always provides a livestream of crucial mission moments, such as launches and landings.) Other agencies and private spaceflight companies are far more forthcoming in their current and future projects, sharing both successes and failures alike. Many missions have not been announced until the last moment, and the particularly risky ones are not usually televised - that way, failures can be kept fairly quiet. Likely contributing to the lack of attention on China’s space program is the government’s own lack of transparency. Since then, two crews of taikonauts (China’s version of astronauts) have completed long-duration missions on the station, while a third is currently onboard for a six-month stay. The first module of China’s Tiangong space station, Tianhe, was launched in May 2021, and the CNSA suggests the final two modules, Mengtian and Wentian, will be launched by the end of this year. Image Credits: CNSA via ReutersĪnd even closer to home than the moon, China is now developing its own space station in low Earth orbit - China is notably banned from the International Space Station due to a 2011 Department of Defense act that prohibits NASA from collaborating with the nation unless specially authorized. (China participated in a failed joint mission with Russia, Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1, which launched in 2011 but did not leave Earth orbit.) Overall, Mars missions, from fly-bys to orbiters to landers, have about a 50% success rate, according to NASA.Ĭraters in Mars’ Arabia Terra region, as photographed by China’s Tianwen-1. The fact that Tianwen-1 even made it to Mars is remarkable, as it was China’s first solo interplanetary mission. But this is just the latest success of a thriving space program that has ambitious goals over the next five years - and it might not even be its most impressive one. has the reliable Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft have imaged the planet over the years, the full-surface survey by China’s program will be valuable to scientists and colony planners across the world if the country releases the imagery widely. Over the course of more than 1,300 orbits, Tianwen-1 has photographed the entire planet in extreme detail, from the icy south pole to the 2,485-mile-long Valles Marineris canyon to the 59,055-foot-tall shield volcano Ascraeus Mons.
#Mars images series
Just this week, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) released a series of high-resolution images of Mars taken by its Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which arrived at the red planet in February 2021 and has been orbiting it ever since. But China’s space program is a rapidly developing superpower that, whether it’s due to political tensions or the government’s careful control of information, doesn’t often get its fair share of attention. But it’s home to surprising traces of an ancient lake in an area that mission planners expected to have been dry even during Mars’s warmer, wetter past, Curiosity found layers of rippled rock, still bearing the texture left behind by waves in an ancient lake.With a $24 billion budget and dozens of active, high-profile missions, it’s not surprising that NASA is the most visible of the dozens of government space agencies in the world. Scientists aren’t sure exactly what the marker band is made of because the frustratingly tough rock has resisted all of Curiosity’s efforts to drill out a sample. The Marker Band Valley gets its name from a thin, dark, and surprisingly tough layer of rock that runs along the valley’s walls. One panorama shows a mid-morning view, while the other shows late afternoon - both timed to take advantage of the most dramatic natural lighting and the dark, deep shadows of Martian winter. You can still get a hint that it’s a composite: The giveaway is in the drastically different angles of the shadows on each side of the image. Curiosity imaging team members created a composite of the images, which was released Monday NASA’s Curiosity Rover recently pointed its navigation cameras back the way it had come to capture two panoramic photos of the rover’s tracks leading out of Marker Band Valley. It takes a lot of work to send a postcard from Mars.
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