After spending three months on the Red Planet, China's Tianwen-1 lander and Zhurong rover touched down on the Martian plain on May 14, 2021. While the Chinese Space Agency has shared images of the rover and lander, NASA has been following it from above.
The lander and rover were spotted by the HiRISE camera on MRO. The lead image shows the path of the rover and its new location, giving us a good idea of how far it has traveled since landing. The image was taken on March 11, 2022.
The views of various hardware on the surface of Mars from China's mission can be seen in the picture.
If you look closely, you can see the rover tracks in the image below. The exact path can be traced from the wheel tracks left on the surface, according to the HiRISE team. It traveled south for 1.5 kilometers.
HiRISE acquires images in long, thin strips. Each strip is about 5 kilometers wide because of how the camera detectors are set up. There is a central color swath about 1 kilometer wide, because there are two extra pairs of detectors on the two middle strips.
MRO is above the Martian surface. It can take pictures of Mars with a resolution of less than a meter across at this altitude. It can spot the various Mars landers and rovers on the surface with that type of power. The two people were captured by HiRISE as they descended.
The amount of territory covered by the HiRISE image strips makes it difficult to spot human-placement artifacts on the surface of Mars.
These @HiRISE observations are so huge, it takes some practice to spot the Earth hardware sitting on the Martian landscape. That's one of the jobs of my small validation team: they search the image for the expected hardware and record the x- and y-coordinates. https://t.co/wmXMqx38st
— Richard Leis ????????? (@RichardLeis1) March 18, 2022
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