China's space agency released video footage from its spacecraft circling Mars on Friday, two days after it successfully entered the planet's orbit in Beijing's latest ambitious space mission.

In the video, published by state broadcaster CCTV, the surface of the planet is seen coming into view out of a pitch black sky against the outside of the Tianwen-1, which entered the orbit of the Red Planet on Wednesday.

White craters are visible on the planet's surface, which fades from white to black through the video as the probe flies over the course of one Martian day, said official news agency Xinhua.

The five-tonne Tianwen-1—which translates as "Questions to Heaven"—includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a solar-powered rover and launched from southern China last July.

To casual observers, landing a rover on Mars can seem kind of like old news, believe it or not, especially after all of NASA's successes. But many are likely not aware of the so-called "Mars Curse." The fact is, many of the spacecraft that attempt to land there fail and crash.

Next to run the gauntlet of the Mars curse is NASA's Perseverance rover. It'll attempt its long-awaited landing at Jezero Crater on February 18. The people at NASA have given the Perseverance rover some finely tuned tools to get it to the Martian surface safely and to beat the Mars curse.

The Perseverance rover is landing at Jezero Crater because NASA thinks they can do the best science there. The mission's goal is to seek signs of ancient life and collect samples for a potential return to Earth. Jezero Crater is an ancient, dried-up paleo-lakebed. It holds both preserved sediments and a delta. According to NASA, the crater is one of the "oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer." Scientists think that if there's any fossilized evidence of ancient life, they may find it at Jezero.

Space: the final frontier. What's stopping us from exploring it? Well, lots of things, but one of the major issues is space radiation, and the effects it can have on astronaut health during long voyages. A new review in the open-access journal Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine explores what we know about the ways that space radiation can negatively affect cardiovascular health, and discusses methods to protect astronauts. These include radioprotective drugs, and antioxidant treatments, some of which are more common than you might think.

Space is incredibly inhospitable. Outside of low earth orbit, astronauts are bombarded with radiation, including galactic cosmic rays, and 'proton storms' released by the sun. This radiation is harmful for the human body, damaging proteins and DNA, and is one of the major reasons that we haven't yet been able to send anyone to Mars, or beyond.

These issues inspired Dr. Jesper Hjortnaes of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands to investigate what we know about the harmful effects of space radiation. "If we want to see human long distance space travel, we need to understand the impact of space-induced disease and how to protect our bodies from it," said Hjortnaes.