Zhurong on course for historic journey

If it touches down safely on the red planet and works as planned, the Tianwen 1 rover will be the sixth such vehicle deployed on Mars, following five predecessors launched by the United States.

If the semi-autonomous craft functions efficiently, it will work for at least three months and undertake comprehensive surveys of the planet.

The rover, recently named Zhurong after an ancient god of fire, is 1.85 meters high and weighs about 240 kilograms.

It has six wheels and four solar panels, and can move at 200 meters an hour on the Martian surface. It carries six scientific instruments, including a multispectral camera, a meteorological sensor and groundpenetrating radar.

They will allow Zhurong to obtain information about a wide range of topics, such as the composition of the planet’s surface, the geological structure, climate and environment.

Tianwen 1, China’s first independent Mars mission, began in July when the probe of the same name was launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province.

As it was loaded with fuel, the probe weighed more than 5 metric tons when it was launched, but its weight gradually decreased as the spacecraft burned the propellants during its flight.

It traveled more than 470 million kilometers before entering a Martian orbit on Feb 10, when it was 193 million km from Earth.

Because the two bodies keep moving on their own orbits, a Mars-bound spacecraft must fly in a carefully designed curved trajectory to catch up with the red planet. Depending on the orbits, Mars is 55 million km to 400 million km from Earth.

On Feb 24, Tianwen 1 entered a preset parking orbit.

The spacecraft has been programmed to maintain that position for about three months to examine the selected touchdown site before releasing its landing capsule to descend through the atmosphere.

The capsule is expected to land sometime next month or in June, and after several days of preparations it will place a rover on the soil.

By the time of the touchdown, Mars will be about 318 million km from Earth, according to the mission planners.

If Tianwen 1 can fulfill its objectives — orbiting the planet to make comprehensive observations, landing on the surface and deploying a rover to conduct tests — it will become the first Mars expedition to accomplish all three goals with one probe.

The most recent rover to operate on Mars was Perseverance of the US, which started operations in the Jezero Crater on Feb 19 (Beijing time).

Tianwen 1 is the world’s 46th Mars exploration mission since October 1960, when the former Soviet Union launched the first Mars-bound spacecraft. Only 19 of those missions have been successful.

Tianwen, meaning “the quest for heavenly truth”, is an epic work by Qu Yuan, a renowned poet from the Chu Kingdom who lived during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC).

The China National Space Administration said that naming the mission after the poem was intended to illustrate China’s determination to explore deep space and also foster a love of science in the nation’s young people.

For the second step in the country’s Mars’ exploration program, a larger probe will set off for the planet sometime around 2030 to take samples and return them to Earth, officials said.