![\"China-Tianwen-1-enters-Mars-polar-orbit-rapidnews-dailyrapidnews-dailyrapid-rapid-news\"](\"https:\/\/dailyrapidnews.com\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/China-Tianwen-1-enters-Mars-polar-orbit-rapidnews-dailyrapidnews-dailyrapid-rapid-news.png\")
<\/p>\nChina’s Tianwen 1 robotic probe entered the orbit above Mars’ polar regions on Monday, moving closer to the red planet, the China National Space Administration said.<\/p>\n
The spacecraft activated its 3,000-Newton-thrust orbital-control engine at 5pm to conduct an orbital plane change maneuver to enter polar orbit with a perigee of about 265 kilometres above the red planet, the administration said in a\u00a0brief statement.<\/p>\n
Next, the probe will carry out several orbital adjustment operations to move itself into a parking orbit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In parking orbit, it will make observations and investigations of the preset landing site.<\/p>\n
Before the latest maneuver, Tianwen 1 was travelling around an elliptical Martian orbit with a perigee of about 400km after its\u00a0arrival in Mars’ gravitational field on Wednesday night, becoming the first Chinese spacecraft to reach the planet.<\/p>\n
Tianwen 1, the country’s first independent Mars mission, was launched by a Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket on\u00a0July 23, 2020\u00a0from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in Hainan province, kicking off the nation’s planetary exploration programme.<\/p>\n
The 5-metric tonne probe, which consists of two major parts \u2014 the orbiter and the landing capsule \u2014 flew for 202 days and about 475-million-km on its journey to Mars. Its average flight speed was about 100,000km per hour.<\/p>\n
During its journey, the spacecraft conducted four midcourse corrections and a deep-space orbital maneuver to make sure it was always precisely aimed at Mars.<\/p>\n
The Tianwen 1 mission’s ultimate goal is to land a rover in May or June on the southern part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia \u2014 a large plain within Utopia, the largest recognised impact basin in the solar system \u2014 to conduct scientific surveys.<\/p>\n
Tianwen 1 is the world’s 46th Mars exploration mission since October 1960, when the former Soviet Union launched the first Mars-bound spacecraft. Only 18 of those missions were successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China’s Tianwen 1 robotic probe entered the orbit above Mars’ polar regions on Monday, moving<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4643,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n