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.
Tianwen-1 braked into Mars orbit at 11:52 UTC on 10 February 2021, one day after Hope and eight days before Perseverance. What made it remarkable was the manifest. The single Long March 5 that left Wenchang in July 2020 carried an orbiter, a landing platform and a rover — all three, on China's first independent mission to another planet. No agency had ever attempted that combination on a first attempt. China's only previous try, the small Yinghuo-1 orbiter, never left Earth orbit; it was riding on Russia's Phobos-Grunt when that spacecraft failed in 2011.
Then the mission did something unusual: it waited. Rather than land straight away, Tianwen-1 spent three months photographing southern Utopia Planitia from orbit, checking the ground it had chosen from images taken by other nations' spacecraft. The lander separated on 14 May and went through roughly nine minutes of entry, descent and landing — aeroshell, parachute, then a throttled retro-rocket and four legs, the conventional approach rather than NASA's sky crane. Touchdown was at 23:18 UTC on 14 May, which made it 15 May in Beijing. The 240-kilogram Zhurong drove down its ramp on 22 May. China became the third country to land softly on Mars and the second to operate a rover there.
Zhurong was built for 90 sols and lasted more than 340. It covered 1,921 metres, which is modest, but its ground-penetrating radar was doing something nobody had done before. Along the traverse it imaged roughly 70 metres of layered material beneath less than 10 metres of loose regolith, published in Nature in 2022. A follow-up in Nature Astronomy in late 2023 identified sixteen buried polygonal wedges below about 35 metres — the frozen-ground cracking pattern you get from repeated freeze and thaw, implying that this mid-latitude plain was cold and wet, near the freezing point of water, around the Hesperian–Amazonian transition.
It never woke up. Zhurong went into planned hibernation on 18 May 2022 for the northern winter and the dust season, and should have revived around the December equinox. It did not. China said nothing for months. In April 2023 Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of the Mars programme, gave the explanation: dust had built up on the solar panels faster than the models predicted, and there was not enough power to bring the rover back. Zhurong carried no radioisotope heater and no mechanism to shake its panels clean. It is dead, and it will stay where it stopped.
The orbiter outlasted it. Between November 2021 and July 2022 it photographed the whole planet — 14,757 frames over 284 orbits — and in April 2023 China released the result as a global colour map of Mars at 76 metres per pixel.