China releases global color images of Mars

Kathmandu: The China National Space Administration (CNSA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on Monday jointly released a series of global images of Mars obtained during China’s first Mars exploration mission.

The series of colored images were released at the launch event of the Space Day of China held in Hefei, the capital city of east China’s Anhui Province.

Processed in accordance with mapping standards with a spatial resolution of 76 meters, the images include the orthographic projection of the eastern and western hemispheres of Mars, the Robinson projection of Mars, and the Mercator projection plus an azimuthal projection of the planet.

According to CNSA, these images are based on 14,757 image data acquired by a remote-sensing camera on the Tianwen-1 orbiter over eight months from November 2021 to July 2022.

China’s Tianwen-1 mission, consisting of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, was launched on July 23, 2020 and entered the orbit of Mars after 202 days of flight.

The lander, carrying the rover Zhurong, touched down on May 15, 2021 in the southern part of Utopia Planitia, a vast plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Zhurong drove down from its landing platform to the Martian surface on May 22, starting its exploration of the red planet.

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