China's Mars Probe Travels around 100m Kilometres

China's Mars probe Tianwen-1 has travelled nearly 100 million km as of 10:08 a.m. Friday, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

The Mars probe is in good shape, and its various payloads have completed self-checking. It has flown in space for 36 days and is 10.75 million kilometers away from Earth, reports Xinhua.

The Mars probe was launched into the Earth-Mars orbit by a Long March-5 rocket on July 23. It is projected to fly 470 million km before hitting Mars, which will be around 195 million km away from Earth by then, according to a report from the CNSA's Lunar Exploration which Space Program Centre.

So far, the Mars probe has produced an image of the Planet and the Moon and carried out the first orbital correction. Starting at 10:20 p.m. on August 19, several payloads on the Mars probe, including the Mars magnetometer, the Mars mineralogy spectrometer, and the high-resolution camera, completed self-checking. The scientific data of the payloads were transmitted to the ground smoothly, confirming that they are in normal condition. Multiple flight control tasks were also carried out normally.

The probe will execute deep-space maneuvers and several orbital corrections and, according to the CNSA, will undertake floating, landing and roving operations while it reaches the Mars orbit.