Beijing Aerospace Control Center staff
Moscow. May 15. INTERFAX.RU – The Chinese Zhuzhong rover from the Tianwen-1 spacecraft landed on Mars on the morning of May 15th. This was reported by the Xinhua news agency with reference to the China National Space Administration.
For China, this was the first probe landing on another planet. Tianwen 1 was launched from the Wenchang Cosmodrome on July 23, 2020.
The spacecraft entered Mars orbit in February after nearly seven months of flight and has been selecting a potential landing site for over two months.
The planned lifetime of the rover is 90 Martian days (solos), which is 2.7% more than Earth days. It will be powered by four solar panels. The speed of movement of the Chinese rover reaches 200 meters per hour.
The Chinese rover is equipped with multispectral cameras for navigation and topographic surveying, a subsurface sensing radar for studying the geological structure of Mars up to 10 meters depth, an instrument for analyzing the chemical composition of the soil and searching for biomolecules, as well as magnetic field detectors and a weather station. As expected, the rover will be able to transmit the first data on the exploration of the planet as early as this year.
China became the third country to land a rover on the planet's surface, after the USSR and the United States.
