BEIJING, January 1. /TASS/. China released on the first day of 2022 a group of new Mars images sent by the Tianwen-1 probe, the Xinhua news agency reports.

As of December 31, 2021, the Tianwen-1 orbiter had been working in orbit for 526 days, at a distance of about 350 million kilometers above Earth. It took 19.5 minutes to transmit the images, said the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

China's Tianwen-1 mission, consisting of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, was launched on July 23, 2020 with the heavy vehicle CZ-5.

The lander, carrying the rover with an expected life span of at least 90 Martian days or about three months on Earth, touched down in the southern part of Utopia Planitia, a vast plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars, on May 15, the news agency says. The orbiter keeps moving around Mars, orbiting the planet in two Martian days (24 hours and 39 minutes). Its main function is to retransmit the signal from the rover.

In the meantime, Zhurong has been working on the surface of the Red Planet for 225 Martian days and already traveled 1,400 meters. The list of the mission’s tasks includes the examination of the morphology and geological characteristics of the surface, the distribution of soil and ice, atmospheric ionosphere, the environment and Mars’s physical fields and internal structure.

China prepared the mission in cooperation with the European Space Agency, France, Austria and Argentina.