After the historic landing on Mars, Zhu Rong's rover is ready to look for signs of water and life.

China's space program made a major leap today. The Zhurong probe successfully landed on Mars, marking the first time China has landed on another planet. The team is now preparing to roll the rover from the landing platform to the dusty surface of Mars and begin a mission to find evidence of water and signs of past life.

This landing made China the second country in history to place a rover on the surface of Mars. After orbiting the red planet for several months, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft released the Zhurong rover and landed on the Utopia Plain, a vast plain that may have been covered by the ancient Martian ocean. The 529-pound rover survived a dangerous descent, including entering the atmosphere, decelerating from supersonic speed with a parachute, and finally using a reverse rocket to land safely on the ground.

Named after the ancient Chinese god of fire, the 529-pound Zhurong rover is similar in size to NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rover, which landed on the red planet in 2004 and sent back information about the planet’s surface Exciting images and data of the situation. The Chinese Mars rover may make more important discoveries in terms of water and past habitability on Earth, paving the way for future human missions to Mars.

Before landing safely, Long Xiao, a planetary scientist at China University of Geosciences, said: “A safe landing on Mars is a huge challenge, especially for China’s first soft landing attempt.” “But this is a necessary step for Mars and deep space exploration.”

A successful landing on the surface of Mars is an extraordinary challenge. Before today, only NASA had safely landed and operated spacecraft on the surface of Mars; in 1971, the Soviet Mars 3 lander transmitted half a photo, and then fell silent about 100 seconds after performing the mission. By landing and roaming on Mars, China is ahead of many aerospace counterparts.

The Zhu Rong rover passed the so-called "Seven Minutes of Terror", which is the time from entering the atmosphere to landing on the ground. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) can only watch the autonomous landing nearly 200 million miles away (as far as it takes 18 minutes to receive the signal from Mars), and hopes everything goes according to plan.

Zhu Rong sat on its orbiter, wrapped in a gas shell, designed to protect the vehicle through the Martian atmosphere. After it was released and experienced the intrusion of the hot atmosphere, a huge parachute was deployed to further slow down the rover's descent.

Then, a landing platform equipped with a Mars rover activated the rocket engine to finally descend to the ground. The laser rangefinder and 3D scanner provide altitude and terrain data, while the camera is used to autonomously select the landing location. 

Michel Blanc of the French Institute of Astrophysics and Planetary Science said that Mars is more difficult to land than the moon. But China has completed a series of successful lunar missions and is ready to land on Mars. Blank pointed out that Chang'e 4 is the first time in history that it will land on the back of the moon in 2019, and it requires "high-tech capabilities" in artificial intelligence and autonomous hedging. Similarly, the rocket engines on Zhu Rong are similar to those of the three spacecraft used by China to safely land on the moon.

These technologies, along with the supersonic parachute that China uses to return astronauts from the capsule from Earth orbit, established CNSA to achieve Mars landing.

Once Zhu Rong's six wheels roll off the landing platform and land on Martian dust, the rover will unfold its foldable butterfly-shaped solar panels and explore the area for a three-month main mission. However, the vehicle can go far beyond this conservative goal-the main missions of the solar-powered "Spirit" and "Opportunity" rover took about 90 days, and they both eventually explored Mars for many years.

The Utopia Plain is believed to be the seat of the ancient ocean, and its sediments may contain evidence of past water. Even more exciting is that these rock layers may contain any traces of past life on Mars, said James Hyde III, a planetary scientist at Brown University.

"Because the pre-selected landing site is close to the ancient ocean coastline, unlike other places, scientific data will reveal more secrets of Mars," Long said. Hyde added that the site complements the research conducted by NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance probes in ancient lakes in the Gale and Jezero craters, respectively.

Zhu Rong rover carries a set of six instruments. A pair of panoramic cameras and multispectral imagers will provide information about the terrain and its composition, while the laser-equipped instrument will evaporate the rock to analyze its composition, similar to the laser spectrometers on Curiosity and Perseverance. The magnetometer will measure the magnetic field in conjunction with the instruments on the orbiter, and the climate station will measure the local atmosphere, temperature, pressure, wind and sound on Mars.

However, one of the most exciting instruments on the rover is the ground penetrating radar, which will be used to search for water or ice bags below the surface. Head pointed out that NASA’s Viking 2 lander landed in an area slightly north of Zhu Rong’s landing site in 1975 and photographed fascinating phenomena, including ice contraction and frost on the surface of Mars, and possibly formed by Martian contraction. Polygonal pattern terrain. Underground ice that changes with the seasons.

Zhu Rong's ground penetrating radar will detect the surface at two different frequencies and obtain echo data from the layers below, looking down 33 feet to look for ice or salt water in the ground.

"Tianwen-1 is likely to be able to use its payload to explore and detect any underground ice and snow," Hyde said. Such ice packs may be valuable for future manned missions, and any water or salt water bag that shields radiation on the surface may provide habitat for simple life forms.

Long said that China will publicly share data on Tianwen-1 and Zhu Rong, just like sharing data on lunar exploration missions, which will benefit planetary scientists around the world.

The mission will also lay the foundation for China's next planned Mars voyage-a bold sample return attempt scheduled to be launched around 2028. Outside of Mars, the country plans to launch Jupiter probes, including a possible landing on the moon Calisto, to collect samples from near-Earth asteroids and send a pair of spacecraft similar to voyagers to the edge of the solar system.

Zhang Xiaoping, associate professor of the State Key Laboratory of Lunar and Planetary Sciences at Macau University of Science and Technology, said: "In the era of ocean exploration, China has a history of Zheng He's voyage to Southeast Asia and Africa." Expeditions in the early 15th century. Zhang sees China's mission to Mars as a continuation of these Ming dynasty journeys.

He said that Tianwen No.1 and Zhu Rong “have great significance for studying the unknown universe, stimulating young people’s scientific enthusiasm, stimulating national creativity, enhancing the ability to explore the unknown, and expanding the living space of mankind.” Humanity. "

Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect the successful landing of the Chinese Zhurong rover on Mars. In addition, the images of China's Chang'e-3 lander and rover have been cropped to remove the background image of the earth that was not in the original mission photos.

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