Color images of the planet Mars taken by the Chinese mission. Author: Telesur
China’s first mission to Mars allowed Chinese scientists to obtain their own color images of the planet with numerous cartographic details, RT reports.
Several projections of the red planet, including the Mercator projection and orthographic projections of the eastern and western hemispheres, were presented on Monday at a joint event of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, held in Hefei.
The 14,757 base images for this work were collected over eight months, from November 2021 to July 2022, using the Tianwen-1 orbiter. The material was processed to mapping standards with a spatial resolution of 76 meters per pixel, according to a CNSA statement.
The Tianwen-1 mission has been in Martian orbit since February 2021, it consists of a satellite, a lander and a lander called Zhurong, which landed on May 15 of that year on the Martian plain Utopia Planitia and was stuck in the dust for months.
In early April, another global map of Mars was presented by the New York University Space Science Center in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) thanks to images taken by the Emirates Exploration Imager. Similarly, the astronomy laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (USA) has developed an interactive map of Mars CTX Global Mosaic, which shows rocks, impact craters and traces of atmospheric vortices in high resolution.
Source: Juventud Rebelde