World News for Students of English

05-07-2022 07:00

A Chinese spacecraft named Tianwen-1 took images that cover the entire planet of Mars.

The spacecraft reached Mars in February 2021, and since that time, it circled the planet more than 1,300 times. Its data includes visuals of Mars’s south pole which holds almost all of the planet’s water. Other images show the 4,000-kilometer long canyon Valles Marineris and the impact craters of Arabia Terra. The location of subsurface water is important to determine the planet’s potential for life, and it also gives a permanent resource for human exploration.

The name of the robotic spacecraft actually has six separate pieces of equipment: an orbiter, two deployable cameras, a lander, a remote camera, and a rover. It has no crew. The probe traveled a total of 475 million kilometers, and after the US, the feat made China the second country to successfully land on Mars.

Difficult words: subsurface (the material that is below the surface of the ground), deployable (to move to a place where something can be used), feat (a difficult act that requires a lot of skill or courage to achieve it).

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