Let’s focus today on the planets (other than Earth) - the wanderers, as the classical Greeks called them. The question of whether the Earth goes round the Sun or vice versa is one we’ll return to. Exactly once each year, the Sun appears to go around the Earth, such that the stars that are overhead at midnight, and thus opposite the Sun, change slightly each day. What else can we learn just with simple observations? Since the stars’ daily motion is an illusion from the Earth’s spin, and since the stars do not visibly move relative to one another, our attention is drawn next to the motion of the objects that move dramatically relative to the stars: the Sun and the planets. We also know that the Sun is much further than the Moon and larger than the Earth, though we don’t know more details yet. Mission controllers at the China National Space Administration said the orbiter is in good condition and still has ample energy.So far the arguments given in recent posts give us a clear idea of how the Earth-Moon system works: Earth’s a spinning sphere of diameter about 8000 miles (13000 km), and the size of the Moon and its distance are known too (diameter about 1/ 4 Earth’s, and distance about 30 times Earth’s diameter). The Tianwen 1 mission has obtained and transmitted nearly 540 gigabytes of data on the Red Planet. The rover had traveled more than 1,400 meters. This made China the third country, after the United States and Russia, (when it was the USSR, in 19), to successfully conduct a Mars landing.ĬNSA reported that as of Januthe 1.85-meter-tall, 240-kilogram Zhurong had worked on Mars and for 224 days – far outliving its three-month life expectancy. A few months later, a landing capsule was released, sending a lander and orbiter to the surface of the planet, landing on May 15. It entered Mars’ orbit in February, 2021. Tianwen 1 launched in July 2020 from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province. A portion of the orbiter can be see on the left. Mars polar ice cap is see in this image from a remote camera deployed by the Tianwen-1 orbiter. For example, what if we could see actual pictures of the James Webb Space Telescope deploying its giant sunshield instead of engineers just seeing telemetry data? But also imagine a free-flying little camera hovering around JWST – and then inadvertently crashing into it. While our first reaction is that every spacecraft should deploy a buddy with a camera to allow us to see how the spacecraft is doing, this also might be a risky idea. A wireless camera took this ‘group photo’ of China’s Ti anwen-1 lander and rover on Mars’ surface. In addition to Tianwen-1 having its own remote cameras, the companion Chinese Mars lander and Zhurong rover placed a wireless remote camera on the ground to take pictures of both the rover and lander. It Global Surveyor also took a picture of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, and these were the first pictures of any spacecraft orbiting Mars ever taken by anot her spacecraft orbiting Mars. NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft was imaged twice by the camera aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor in 2005. While this isn’t the first time one spacecraft has taken a picture of another spacecraft at Mars, this concept of bringing your own selfie camera is pretty darn innovative. A remote ‘selfie’ camera took this image of the Tainwen-1 spacecraft in orbit of Mars.
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