Tianwen-1- Development, China's 2020 Mission Options

[Stu]

Sounds like one is planned...

[nogal]

Searching Alan Boyle's twitter posts I chanced upon a post by Thomas Schumann. At the EPSC-DPS 2019 Joint Meeting the late Dr. Wei Yan gave a presentation about China's first Mars mission. One of the slides clearly shows two landing sites in Utopia Planitia. Thomas also says "As far as I've understood, the Chinese will evaluate final landing sites once in orbit."

Here is a Google Mars globe with the CTX map made available by Google (see the side bar for how to enable the CTX global map) and those two areas marked, and a closer view that shows Area A has very little coverage. However, Google has not mapped every CTX image, so other images may be available (as well as from the HiRISE camera).





This is the kmz file I used to mark the areas.  Tianwen_1_CandidateLandingAreas.kmz ( 876bytes ) Number of downloads: 605


Fernando

[Antdoghalo]

Searching Alan Boyle's twitter posts I chanced upon a post by Thomas Schumann. At the EPSC-DPS 2019 Joint Meeting the late Dr. Wei Yan gave a presentation about China's first Mars mission. One of the slides clearly shows two landing sites in Utopia Planitia. Thomas also says "As far as I've understood, the Chinese will evaluate final landing sites once in orbit."

Here is a Google Mars globe with the CTX map made available by Google (see the side bar for how to enable the CTX global map) and those two areas marked, and a closer view that shows Area A has very little coverage. However, Google has not mapped every CTX image, so other images may be available (as well as from the HiRISE camera).





This is the kmz file I used to mark the areas.  Tianwen_1_CandidateLandingAreas.kmz ( 876bytes ) Number of downloads: 605


Fernando

Quite true, Google's CTX layer is 9 years old and MRO has since mapped almost the entire planet with it aside from a couple tiny areas in the poles
https://themis.asu.edu/maps I used this site to find HiRise and CTX images that are not available in GE, (though I wish you could sort by year it's hard to find pre-post landing pictures when there's 100s of HiRISE images saturating a location)