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The views were captured by a program run by NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which scans huge swaths of the sky for space rocks in order to gather enough observations for astronomers to map each object's path in case one may come a little too close for comfort. The new animation of Tianwen-1 speeding away from Earth came from a facility at Mauna Loa on Hawaii Island that is one of a pair of Hawaiian observatories that make up the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS. The ATLAS observatories regularly identify new celestial objects, like the comet of the...

The red planet will be at its closest point to Earth in late July, at around 36 million miles (58 million kilometers), but Tianwen-1 will still have to navigate a much greater distance to land on Mars' surface sometime in April 2021. That requires a good deal of navigational accuracy and a terrifying descent to the surface. As the US and Russia are well aware, Mars is notoriously good at killing off robotic explorers. Over 50% of the missions sent to the red planet fail. The Chinese mission will kick the difficulty up a few more notches. Tianwen-1 is a...

Tianwen-1, meaning ‘questions to heaven’, is taken from the name of a long-form poem by Qu Yuan, a poet born in the fourth century B.C., according to CNSA chief engineer Ge Xiaochun. China is understood to be planning a Mars sample return mission, a Jupiter orbiter and considering possible missions to icy giants and interstellar space. A joint near-Earth asteroid sample return and comet rendezvous mission has also been proposed. Few details of the Tianwen-1 mission have been released so far. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to have a wet mass of around 5 metric tons. Launch on a Long...