The first Chinese rover on Mars, the six-wheeled Zhurong, rode to the surface of the Red Planet late Friday evening (May 21) to begin exploring its new home: the vast Martian plain of Utopia Planicia.
Jurong, who landed on Mars for a week earlier on May 14, it sailed to the surface of Mars from its landing platform at 10:40 pm ET Friday (10:40 am Saturday, May 22nd Beijing time). Over the next 90 days, it is expected to map the area, look for signs of water ice, monitor the weather and study the composition of the surface.
Photos from Jurong published by the China National Space Administration show views from the rover’s navigation cameras. In one image, the rover is still on its lander, looking down at the double ramps it took to roll across the surface of Mars. The second photo shows the three-legged Zhurong lander that delivered the rover to the surface of Mars last week.
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530 lb. (240 kg), the rover, named after the ancient fire god from Chinese mythology, arrived on Mars aboard the Chinese spacecraft Tianwen-1, which was launched in July 2020 and is now orbiting the Red Planet.
Jurong is a solar-powered rover designed to stay on the surface of Mars for at least 90 Martian days (called salts). He is equipped with high-resolution cameras for photographing and mapping his Utopia Planita home. The rover is also equipped with a subsurface radar that allows you to look inside the Martian surface, a multispectral camera and a surface composition detector, a magnetic field detector and a weather monitor.
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China is only the second country after the United States to land a rover on Mars, and Jurong has joined two other active rovers, NASA’s curiosity and tenacity, which are now exploring different parts of the Red Planet.
Meanwhile, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to explore Mars for at least a full Martian year, about 687 Earth days.
NASA has also landed three previous rovers on Mars: Sojourner in 1997 and the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, all of which have completed their missions. The European Space Agency will launch its own rover Rosalind Franklin to Mars in 2022 as part of its ExoMars mission.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@ or follow him on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow us on @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.