Shortly after 07:00 local Beijing time, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that it has successfully landed the 240 kilogram (530 pound) 6-wheeled Zhurong rover on Utopia Planitia, a large plain on the northern hemisphere of Mars. According to Chinese state media, the Zhurong rover's landing used a combination of a protective aeroshell capsule, a parachute, and a rocket platform to make its descent. The success plants China as the second nation to have a successfully operational rover on the red planet and the third to achieve a soft landing on Mars after the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All other countries that have attempted to land a rover so far have either experiences crashes or lost contact not long after a landing.
Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated the CNSA on their "outstanding achievement" while Thomas Zurbuchen, the Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, also voices his congratulations, adding that "I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity's understanding of the Red Planet".
The Zhurong rover was carried to Mars by the Tianwen-1 probe, a spacecraft with a total mass of nearly 5 tons. The mission was launched on July 23rd, 2020, from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch site using a Long March 5 heavy lift rocket, and entered orbit around Mars on February 10th, 2021. While the rover is expected to operate for 90 Martian days (sols), it could operate much longer for planned. For instance, NASA's Opportunity rover was also planned to operate for 90 sols, but instead was able to stay operational for 5,111 sols, about 57 times its designed lifespan.
Note: The first image used in this article was originally posted by 中新网, and depicts the Long March 5 rocket with the Tianwen-1. It was published on July 24th, 2020 and is being used under CC BY 3.0 in this article. It was originally published by the China News Service, a state-owned media and news outlet in China, and this particular shot was a screenshot of a video posted to YouTube (You can click that blue link to see the video). All other images used in this article were retrieved from the public domain, and do not require attribution or citation for commercial purposes.
