AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Other agencies and private spaceflight companies are far more forthcoming in their current and future projects, sharing both successes and failures alike. Many missions have not been announced until the last moment, and the particularly risky ones are not usually televised - that way, failures can be kept fairly quiet. Likely contributing to the lack of attention on China’s space program is the government’s own lack of transparency. Since then, two crews of taikonauts (China’s version of astronauts) have completed long-duration missions on the station, while a third is currently onboard for a six-month stay. The first module of China’s Tiangong space station, Tianhe, was launched in May 2021, and the CNSA suggests the final two modules, Mengtian and Wentian, will be launched by the end of this year. Image Credits: CNSA via ReutersĪnd even closer to home than the moon, China is now developing its own space station in low Earth orbit - China is notably banned from the International Space Station due to a 2011 Department of Defense act that prohibits NASA from collaborating with the nation unless specially authorized. (China participated in a failed joint mission with Russia, Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1, which launched in 2011 but did not leave Earth orbit.) Overall, Mars missions, from fly-bys to orbiters to landers, have about a 50% success rate, according to NASA.Ĭraters in Mars’ Arabia Terra region, as photographed by China’s Tianwen-1. The fact that Tianwen-1 even made it to Mars is remarkable, as it was China’s first solo interplanetary mission. But this is just the latest success of a thriving space program that has ambitious goals over the next five years - and it might not even be its most impressive one. has the reliable Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft have imaged the planet over the years, the full-surface survey by China’s program will be valuable to scientists and colony planners across the world if the country releases the imagery widely. Over the course of more than 1,300 orbits, Tianwen-1 has photographed the entire planet in extreme detail, from the icy south pole to the 2,485-mile-long Valles Marineris canyon to the 59,055-foot-tall shield volcano Ascraeus Mons. Just this week, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) released a series of high-resolution images of Mars taken by its Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which arrived at the red planet in February 2021 and has been orbiting it ever since. But China’s space program is a rapidly developing superpower that, whether it’s due to political tensions or the government’s careful control of information, doesn’t often get its fair share of attention. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.With a $24 billion budget and dozens of active, high-profile missions, it’s not surprising that NASA is the most visible of the dozens of government space agencies in the world. Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. USA TODAY, April 7, 2021, Fact check: Viral image claiming to show Madagascar red owl is digital art.Discover, May 22, 2012, A fake and a real view of the solar eclipse.12, Fact check: Illustration shows artist's depiction of exoplanet, not photo of Earth and sun International Space Station, accessed Feb. A NASA spokesperson said the photo was not taken from the International Space Station. The image is digitally generated artwork. Our rating: Falseīased on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that an image of a solar eclipse was taken from the International Space Station. USA TODAY reached out to A4size-ska for comment. The image was not a photo, but, instead an artist's rendering of exoplanet, Kepler-186f. USA TODAY has previously debunked a claim that an image showed the Earth and sun in the same frame. "It looks like a composite of several images or was digitally rendered," he told USA TODAY in an email. "The station has never flown in the path of totality during a total solar eclipse."
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |