NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars in February, and China successfully landed its own rover elsewhere on the Red Planet on Saturday.
The China National Space Administration on Wednesday released two images taken by its rover, Zhurong, one in color and the other in black-and-white.
The color image was taken by a navigation camera of the rear of the solar-powered rover. It showed both the solar panel and antenna had unfolded as expected. The black-and-white image was taken by the rover’s obstacle avoidance camera, showing a deployed ramp and the flat Martian surface. The rover is expected to descend the pair of ramps on Friday or Saturday.
Zhurong is named after a god of fire in Chinese mythology. It will leave its lander and patrol the surface on a three-month mission to find evidence of ancient life on Mars. Perseverance has a similar mission and will take surface samples starting in July that will be stored to be sent back to Earth for study on later missions, as early as 2026. NASA is hoping to find signs of microbial life in the samples.
The Chinese rover is not considered to be as technologically advanced as Perseverance, but China was able to reach the surface and land a rover without previous intermediary missions that NASA undertook starting in 1971.
Zurong weighs 529 pounds, has six wheels and six science instruments. It was launched July 23, 2020, from Hainan, China, taking seven months to reach the red planet.
In addition to Zurong and Perseverance on the surface, the United Arab Emirates has sent a Hope Probe to the planet, which entered orbit in February and will study the planet from orbit only.
China tried to reach Mars in 2011 with a probe, but a malfunction kept it in Earth’s orbit after the launch. A year later, it fell back to Earth and landed in the Pacific Ocean. Earlier in May, a Chinese rocket called the Long March 5B weighing 40,000 pounds plunged into the Indian Ocean. It had been launched in April to put part of China’s new space station into orbit. The idea was that the rocket would hurtle through space, but gravity from Earth pulled it back.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated the CNSA on Zhurong’s pictures in a tweet but also warned U.S. House lawmakers that China is a “very aggressive competitor” in space exploration. He said that China’s successes in space should provoke concern about the funding for NASA’s Artemis mission to send astronauts to the Moon in the mid-2020s, with later missions to Mars.
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