China’s Zhurong rover lands on Red Planet

BEIJING: An unmanned Chinese spacecraft landed on Mars on Saturday, making China only the second country after the United States to successfully land on the red planet.

China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, currently in orbit around Mars, dropped its lander and rover named Zhurong after a Chinese mythological god of fire - on the surface of the planet early on Saturday, completing a critical stage of the ongoing mission, described by Chinese state media as “extremely complicated with no ground control”.

The probe landed on a site on a vast lava plain known as Utopia Planitia, “leaving a Chinese footprint on Mars for the first time”, Xinhua reported.

The entry, descent and landing (EDL) took around nine minutes, during which the speed of the craft was reduced from 20,000km per hour to zero, the China Academy of Space Technology , the developer of the lander-rover combo of Tianwen-1, said.

The China National Space Administration said that Zhurong had landed on Mars after “nine minutes of terror”, which is how Nasa describes the time interval when scientists on Earth have no control over the rover because of communication delays.

Tianwen-1, consisting of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, was launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the coast of southern China’s Hainan island on July 23, 2020.

“After flying for approximately three hours, the entry capsule hurtled towards the red planet and entered the Mars atmosphere at an altitude of 125km, initiating the riskiest phase of the whole mission.”