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Let's go to Mars

China arrives at Mars and lands a rover on its first try

Tianwen-1 entered orbit on 10 February and dropped Zhurong onto Utopia Planitia three months later — orbiter, lander and rover delivered on a country's first attempt.

Two craft standing on flat rust-red ground under a pale butterscotch sky: a six-wheeled rover with four outstretched solar panels on the left, a squat four-legged landing platform with its ramp down on the right.
The rover and the platform it rolled off, photographed together on Utopia Planitia by a small camera Zhurong set on the ground and then drove away from. · Image: 中国新闻网

Tianwen-1 braked into Mars orbit at 11:52 UTC on 10 February 2021, one day after Hope and eight days before Perseverance. One Long March 5 had launched from Wenchang in July 2020 carrying orbiter, landing platform and rover. China's only previous attempt, the small Yinghuo-1 orbiter, rode Russia's Phobos-Grunt and never left Earth orbit when it failed in 2011.

It then spent three months photographing southern Utopia Planitia, checking the landing site it had picked from other nations' images. The lander separated on 14 May, about three hours before a roughly nine-minute descent: aeroshell, parachute, throttled retro-rocket and four legs rather than NASA's sky crane. Touchdown was at 23:18 UTC on 14 May, 15 May in Beijing; the 240-kilogram Zhurong drove down the ramp on 22 May. China became the third country to land softly on Mars and the second to operate a rover.

Zhurong was built for 90 sols and lasted more than 340, covering 1,921 metres. Its ground-penetrating radar imaged roughly 70 metres of layered material beneath less than 10 metres of regolith, reported in Nature in 2022; a follow-up in Nature Astronomy in late 2023 found sixteen buried polygonal wedges below about 35 metres. Frozen ground cracks into that pattern under repeated freeze and thaw, implying this mid-latitude plain was cold and wet, near the freezing point of water, at the Hesperian–Amazonian transition.

Zhurong entered hibernation on 18 May 2022 for the northern winter and dust season, as planned, and did not revive at the December equinox. In April 2023 Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of the Mars programme, said dust had built up on the solar panels faster than models predicted, leaving too little power; the rover carried no radioisotope heater, and it could flip its panels clean only while powered.

Between November 2021 and July 2022 the orbiter photographed the whole planet — 14,757 frames over 284 orbits — and in April 2023 China released a global colour map at 76 metres per pixel.