Friday

China’s planetary exploration has been named TianWen with the title of an ancient poem (~BC 300) meanings “Question for Heaven”. China’s first Mars Mission, TianWen-1, has achieved a great success in sending an orbiter, a lander and a rover to the red planet in one mission. TianWen-1 launched on July 23, 2020, entered the orbit around Mars on May 10th, 2021. The Mars rover, named Zhurong after the god of fire in Chinese mythology, landed successfully on Mars on May 15th. This talk will give a brief introduction about the scientific objectives, orbital parameters, and instruments of TianWen-1 and Zhurong. We will present some of our current research results about the global magnetic morphology and its relationship with escaping ion distributions in the Martian space environment based on the MAVEN and VEX observations, then we will talk about some of our research plans about the ion escape and planetary magnetisms that can be carried out soon with TianWen-1 observations. Possible joint research between TianWen-1, MAVEN and Mars Express will be discussed. At last, the Chinese future Mars mission will be mentioned briefly.