China has landed on Mars for the first time. The landing module of the Chinese spacecraft Tianwen-1 touched down on Saturday morning with the Zhurong rover on board on the surface of the red planet, as the state news agency Xinhua reported, citing the space agency. Tianwen-1 broke from Earth last July and reached Mars orbit in February. The rover is now to examine the atmosphere and the soil of Mars for about three months and take pictures.
The Chinese mission is one of three flights to Mars that took off from Earth last summer. The United Arab Emirates and the USA had also sent rockets towards Mars at that time. The US rover Perseverance landed in February.
The launch of the Mars probe with the rover last July was an important success for China’s space program. The landing process that Zhurong had to complete on Saturday is also known as the “seven minutes of horror” because it is faster than radio signals from Mars can reach Earth.
So far, only the US and China have made it to Mars
So far, only the US has managed to deploy reconnaissance vehicles on the Red Planet. China is now the first country to orbit the red planet, land and rover on its first mission to Mars. The only two other countries that have so far succeeded in landing on Mars, namely the USA and what was then the Soviet Union, had to make several attempts.
The Soviet Union landed in the 1970s, but contact with the probe was immediately lost. The flight to the red planet and landing are considered extremely difficult. Only about half of previous landing attempts were successful.
A parachute and brake engines helped to slow down the Chinese probe. The vehicle initially hovered around 100 meters above the surface of Mars to identify obstacles and autonomously find a landing site. Finally, the lander touches down safely on the surface with its four legs. “Every step only had one chance” in this “extremely complicated” maneuver, quoted state media Geng Yan, an employee of the Chinese space program. “If there had been only one mistake, the landing would have failed.”
240 kilo rover
If everything goes according to plan, the rover Zhurong, named after the Chinese god of fire, who touched down in the Utopia Planitia region, should wake up and work and carry out investigations for at least three months.
The rover weighs around 240 kilograms. It has six wheels and four solar panels and can move at 200 meters per hour on the surface of Mars. The rover carries scientific instruments with which information about the composition of the planet’s surface, the geological structure and the climate can be collected.
China invests billions in space
China has invested billions in the past few years to catch up with the US in space travel, which has been sending spaceships and astronauts into space for decades. At the end of April, the People’s Republic put the first module of its new space station into orbit. The station is scheduled to go into operation next year.
In December, China completed an ambitious lunar mission: a capsule with two kilograms of samples from the earth’s satellite returned safely to earth. A manned moon landing is another project that China intends to realize soon.
Last week, the uncontrolled crash of a Chinese rocket into the Indian Ocean cast a slight shadow over the space travel nation China. The rocket of the type Langer Marsch-5B, which had brought the first module of the Chinese space station into space, had lost altitude in an uncontrolled manner. Your crash in an inhabited area or on a ship could not be completely ruled out, which was criticized by NASA and space experts. (SDA / AFP / kes)