China Successfully Lands a Rover on Mars
takyon writes:
China has landed its first rover on Mars - here's what happens next
China's Tianwen-1 spacecraft, currently in orbit around the Red Planet, has dropped its lander and rover - named Zhurong after a Chinese mythological god of fire - completing the most perilous stage of its ten-month mission.
[...] It is China's first mission to Mars, and makes it only the third nation - after Russia and the United States - to have landed a spacecraft on the planet. The mission "is a big leap for China because they are doing in a single go what NASA took decades to do", says Roberto Orosei, a planetary scientist at the Institute of Radioastronomy of Bologna in Italy.
Zhurong now joins several other active missions at Mars. NASA's Perseverance rover, which arrived on 18 February, is several hundred kilometres away from the landing site, while NASA's Curiosity rover has been poking around the planet since 2012. Several spacecraft are also circling Mars, including the United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter, which also arrived in February. "The more the merrier on Mars," says David Flannery, an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
Researchers say that the engineering feat of getting there has taken precedence over science in China's first tour of Mars, but the mission could still reveal new geological information. They are especially excited about the possible detection of permafrost in Utopia Planitia, the region in the northern hemisphere of Mars where Zhurong has landed (see 'Landing site').
Also at Space News.
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