China managed to start its mission to Mars ahead of NASA sends its Perseverance rover skyward, commencing the mission on July 23rd. The Mars probe heading for the Pink Planet right now will present China with a wealth of info and observations of the alien world, but it’s even now received a extended, extended way to go before it arrives.

In the meantime, the China Nationwide Space Administration took the time to gaze in its rearview and seize a excellent picture of the probe’s household planet and its moon. The graphic, which was printed by the Xinhua information agency, is a pleasant reminder that China is quickly catching up to other world powers in the race to investigate house.

As Xinhua explains, the photograph was snapped on July 27th, and the spacecraft was cruising along at a length of all around 1.2 million kilometers from Earth. As you can see in the picture, the Moon seems significantly more substantial than the much more distant Earth.

The mission by itself is a pretty significant deal for China, as it will involve not only an orbiter to watch the earth from over but also a rover that will be sent to the surface to take a look at and review numerous factors. It is also the to start with Chinese rover mission to Mars, putting it on the very same amount as other place-faring entire world powers like the United States.

In a new paper, the science crew behind the Tianwen-1 mission uncovered all the large-tech gear that is coming together for the ride:

“There are 13 scientific payloads in the Tianwen-1 mission in complete. The seven devices on board the orbiter comprise two cameras, the Mars-Orbiting Subsurface Exploration Radar, Mars Mineralogy Spectrometer, Mars Magnetometer, Mars Ion and Neutral Particle Analyzer, and Mars Energetic Particle Analyzer. The six devices put in on the rover comprise the Multispectral Digital camera, Terrain Digicam, Mars-Rover Subsurface Exploration Radar, Mars Surface area Composition Detector, Mars Magnetic Field Detector, and Mars Meteorology Watch.”

That’s a entire bunch of devices, and China has some incredibly particular ambitions for the mission. It hopes to map the Martian surface, look at the soil and distribution of ice throughout the world, and even evaluate the skinny Martian environment and how it impacts the local weather of the planet.

In the meantime, NASA’s Perseverance rover mission is slated for a launch on July 30th. The mission will which include the rover by itself as very well as the initial-at any time Mars helicopter which will — if matters go very well — turn out to be the very first aircraft to consider to the skies on another planet.