page_title: Tianwen-1
section_title: Mission planning
hierarchical_section_title: Tianwen-1 / Mission planning
caption_attribution_description: English: A topological map of Mars with successful landings (green), failure (red), successful landing but loss of the probe (orange), in coming landing (pink), the two pre-selected landing site of Tianwen-1 and the final chosen landing site.
context_page_description: Tianwen-1 is an interplanetary mission to Mars by the China National Space Administration to send a robotic spacecraft, which consists of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. The mission was successfully launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on 23 July 2020 with a Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket, and is currently en route to Mars, having already traveled about 3 million kilometers to date. Tianwen-1 carried out its first mid-course correction on 1 August 2020 during 20 seconds and will make two more course corrections and a deep-space maneuver as it makes its way to the planet over the next seven months. The spacecraft has begun to conduct scientific operations with the Mars Energetic Particle Analyzer, mounted on the orbiter, which has already transmitted data back to ground control. Its stated objectives are to search for evidence of both current and past life, and to assess the planet's environment.
  The name "Tianwen" comes from the long poem of the same name written by Qu Yuan, one of the greatest poets of Ancient China. It is a poem of a series of questions starting with how the universe was created.
context_section_description: In late 2019, the Xi'an Aerospace Propulsion Institute, a subsidiary of CASC, stated that the performance and control of the future spacecraft's propulsion system has been verified and had passed all requisite pre-flight tests, including tests for hovering, hazard avoidance, deceleration, and landing. The main component of the lander's propulsion system consists of a single engine that provides 7500 newtons of thrust. The spacecraft's supersonic parachute system had also been successfully tested previously.
  CNSA initially focused on the Chryse Planitia and on the Elysium Mons regions of Mars in its search for possible landing sites for the lander and its associated rover. However, in September 2019, during a joint meeting in Geneva of the European Planetary Science Congress-Division for Planetary Sciences, Chinese presenters announced that two preliminary sites in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars have instead been chosen for the anticipated landing attempt, with each site having a landing ellipse of approximately 100 by 40 kilometres.
  On 23 January 2020, China Youth Daily reported that, according to sources from CASC, the Mars probe will be launched in July 2020 by the Long March 5 Y4 carrier rocket. This was the first time that China has officially announced the month in which the probe will be launched from Earth. The newspaper also reported that the Long March 5 Y4 rocket's hydrogen-oxygen engine has completed a 100-seconds test, which was the last engine test prior to the final assembly of the carrier rocket. It successfully launched on time.
caption: Map of Mars with the two possible landing areas of Tianwen-1, and the locations of previous Mars landings.
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