Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult, not least because engineers back on Earth have no control over it in real time, and must leave pre-programmed instructions to play out. The spacecraft departed Earth in July 2020 and arrived at Mars in February 2021, but the landing was the biggest test yet of China’s nascent deep-space exploration capabilities. The Tianwen-1 mission included an orbiter, a lander and a rover - making it the first to send all three elements to the planet. They are especially excited about the possibility of detecting permafrost in Utopia Planitia, the region in the northern hemisphere of Mars where Zhurong has landed (see ‘Landing site’). 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. “The more the merrier on Mars,” says David Flannery, an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Several spacecraft are also circling Mars, including the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter, which also arrived in February. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which arrived on 18 February, is several hundred kilometres away from the landing site, and NASA’s Curiosity rover has been poking around the planet since 2012. Zhurong now joins several other active Mars missions. 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. This is China’s first mission to Mars, and makes the country only the third nation - after Russia and the United States - to have landed a spacecraft on the planet. If there had been any flaw, the landing would have failed,” Geng Yan, an official at the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told Xinhua. “Each step had only one chance, and the actions were closely linked. The craft’s plummet through the Martian atmosphere had to be performed autonomously. Once it reached 100 metres above the Martian surface, it hovered and used a laser-guided system to assess the area for obstacles such as boulders before landing. As the probe closed in on Mars, it released a huge parachute to slow its progress, and then used rocket boosters to brake. It then hurtled towards the surface at 4.8 kilometres per second, protected by a heat shield. After several hours, it entered Mars’s atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometres. Credit: CNSA/Xinhua/AlamyĬhina’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, in orbit around the red planet, has dropped its lander and rover - named Zhurong after a Chinese god of fire - completing the most perilous stage of its ten-month mission.Īccording to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, an entry capsule enclosing the vehicles separated from the orbiter at about 4 a.m.
The surface of Mars, photographed by China’s Tianwen-1 probe after it arrived in orbit in February.