#Zhurong: China lands its first rover on the Red Planet

(CNSA)

The landing platform of the Chinese mission Tianwen-1 successfully landed the rover Zhurong in the Utopia plain on Mars.

Thus, China became the third country in the world that managed to deliver an automatic device to the Red Planet.

Tianwen 1 was China's first mission to Mars, launched last summer. The mission consists on an orbital probe and a landing platform with a rover

The tasks of the spacecraft include studying the composition and structure of the surface of Mars and the subsurface layer, ionosphere, climate, as well as searching for deposits of water ice.

Tianwen-1 entered orbit around Mars in February of this year, and soon the orbital probe began its scientific program.

The six-wheeled rover, named Zhurong in honor of the god of fire, has a mass of 240 kilograms and is equipped with a number of scientific instruments.

Those instruments are two optical and one multispectral cameras, a ground penetrating radar, a magnetometer, a weather station and a spectral soil analyzer that includes a laser.

The spacecraft will be powered by four solar panels, and it will communicate with the Earth through an orbital probe. The rover's estimated operating time is 90 Martian days (sols).

Today the rover successfully landed in the Utopia Plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars.

The entire landing operation took eight minutes. First the capsule separated from the orbital probe and performed aerodynamic braking in the atmosphere.

Then it released a parachute, fired off the front heat shield, and started the braking system engines.

The device finally dropped the external heat shield, and hovered on an altitude of about 70 meters from Mars to make a soft landing using lidar and cameras.

Source:

• Xinhua: https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4637036026006686

#zhurong #tianwen1 #china #mars #cnsa