China's rover lands on Mars

  • China successfully landed the Zhurong rover on Mars, making it China’s first landing on another planet. 
  • China became the 3rd country to perform a successful soft landing successfully on Mars, after the former Soviet Union and the USA. 
  • The rover is a part of the Tianwen-1 mission, which entered the orbit around Mars in February. 
  • The rover performed its landing with a similar “seven minutes of terror”, as had the NASA landers, when the autonomous landing worked itself out in its most crucial stage nearly 350 million km away, with an 18-minute delay in signal reception and no human intervention. 

TIANWEN-1 MISSION

  • Tianwen-1 is an interplanetary mission by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) to send a robotic spacecraft to Mars.
  • It consists of 1. of an orbiter, 2. deployable camera, 3. lander and 4. the Zhurong rover.
  • Landing Site: Utopia Planitia. 
  • The lander, with the rover attached, touched down in Utopia Planitia, in the northern hemisphere of Mars.
  • The rover will search for present, or most importantly, past life on the planet.
  • The mission aims to study the thickness and sub-layer distribution of the Martian soil.

HISTORY OF MARS LANDINGS

  • The Soviet Union in 1971 became the first country to carry out a Mars landing, Mars 3.
  • The second country to reach Mars’s surface is the United State of America (USA).
  • Since 1976, it has achieved 8 successful Mars landings, the latest being the ‘InSight’ in 2019.
  • India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) or Mangalyaan was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh by Indian Space Research Organisation in November 2013.

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