China's first Mars mission is about to reach orbit around the red planet. With the spacecraft 400 million kilometers (249 million miles) away from Earth, communication is vital. Hence, Chinese scientists prepared giant satellite dishes to collect signals from the red planet.
This antenna, located in Northern China, covers an area about the size of 10 basketball courts. The dish has a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet) and weighs 2,450 tonnes (2,700 tons). The dish contains 1,328 high-precision panels and has an area of 49,000 square feet (4,560 square meters).
The construction of the antenna started in October 2018. It should be the largest fully steerable antenna in Asia. The antenna is intended to receive data from Mars. National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC), the dish's operator, took over the antenna on February 3.
How The Satellite Dish Works
Li Hongwei, deputy director of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation's 39th Research Institute, told CGTN that new developments had been implemented in the construction of the antenna.
The hoisting and installation lasted for more than an hour. The antenna body and equipment debugging can be further improved.
Li Chunlai, the deputy chief designer of China's Mars exploration project, told South China Morning Post that the signals would first reach the panels under the antennas' feet. They will bounce back the signals to a reflector and back to the signal feed to amplify the weak signals. After that, the scientists can transmit and process the signals.
As signals travel that distance, their energy becomes attenuated and signal density decreases. That means scientists would receive less energy per unit area. Hence, experts need a dish with a large surface area to collect enough energy.
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The movable antenna can be rotated and steered to watch Mars as its location in the sky alters. The new facility in Tianjin joins several smaller diameter dishes around the country to sustain its space operations.
It will constellate with two antennas from Beijing's Miyun District and one from Yunnan Province in southwest China to collect data from the Red Planet.
Li added that their Mars probe would be a "meaningless failure" if they cannot receive scientific exploration data from Mars.
About China Tianwen-1 Probe
The pair is expected to reach Mars orbit on Wednesday, February 10 (7 am EST / 8 pm Beijing time). In May, it will deploy a rover to explore Utopia Planitia on Red Planet's surface. The Tianwen-1 five-ton spacecraft consists of both an orbiter and a rover.
Tianwen-1 will begin training the mission's rover for a later landing attempt after entering orbit, scheduled about May.
In preparation for the landing, the Tianwen-1 orbiter will photograph the landing field. The high-resolution camera of the spacecraft returned a beautiful image of Mars from a distance of 1.36 million miles (2.2 million km) on Friday (February 5).
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