China

China’s space agency released video images of its spacecraft circling Mars on Friday, two days after it successfully entered the planet’s orbit on Beijing’s latest ambitious space mission.

In the video, posted by state broadcaster CCTV, the planet’s surface is seen emerging from a completely black sky against the exterior of Tianwen-1, which entered the orbit of the Red Planet on Wednesday.

The white craters are visible on the planet’s surface, which fades from white to black through video as the probe flies over the course of a Martian day, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The five-ton Tianwen-1, which translates to “Questions to the Sky,” includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a solar exploration vehicle and was launched from southern China last July.

It’s the latest step in Beijing’s space program, which aims to establish a manned space station by 2022 and eventually put an astronaut on the moon, and it has opened up a new alien arena for competition between the United States and China.

Tianwen-1 launched around the same time as a rival US mission and is expected to land on the planet’s surface in May.

Its success comes the same week that the United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe also successfully entered the orbit of Mars, making history as the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission.

Chinese scientists hope to land a 240-kilogram (530-pound) rover in May in Utopia, a massive impact basin on Mars. Your orbiter will last for one Martian year.

For the three-month study of the planet’s soil and atmosphere, the mission will take photos, map maps and look for signs of past life.

The probe has already sent its first image of Mars, a black and white photo that showed geological features such as the Schiaparelli crater and Valles Marineris, a vast stretch of canyons on the Martian surface.

Mars has proven to be a challenging target, and most missions since 1960, sent by Russia, Europe, Japan, and India, have ended in failure.

NASA’s Perseverance, which will land on the Red Planet on February 18, will become the fifth rover to complete the journey since 1997, and all so far have been Americans.

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