February is a busy month on Mars, with three spacecraft missions closing in on the red planet. China’s Tianwen-1 is one of them, and it already has an eye on its new home in the solar system. The Chinese National Space Agency released Tianwen-1’s first view of Mars on Friday.
The image arrived some six months after the craft blasted off from China’s southern Hainan island in July 2020.
The black-and-white picture was taken around 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Mars or around 184 million kilometers from Earth some 197 days into its mission, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The unmanned Tianwen-1 is expected to enter Mars’ orbit later this month and will attempt a landing on the Red Planet’s Utopia Planitia in its northern hemisphere in May, where it will deploy a rover.
This rover is currently pencilled in to conduct a 90-day survey mission in what would be another historic first for the mission and for the world, as it would mark the first time in history a country managed to orbit, land and deploy an exploratory rover in its inaugural mission to the Red Planet.
