What China Brings to Mars with Its Lander and Rover

This week China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter sent a lander to the surface of the planet. Onboard the landing module is Zhurong, a rover that will roll off to become the third currently exploration vehicle on the planet’s surface.

The Zhurong rover weighs 240 kilograms and is solar-powered. it has 6 instruments designed to study the geology of Mars. Its onboard spectroscope will look at soil mineralogy and water ice distribution, as well as electromagnetic and gravitational fields.

How does Zhurong compare to Perseverance and Curiosity?

Zhurong is more akin to Spirit and Opportunity than the two much larger nuclear-powered NASA rovers. Perseverance is a more advanced version of Curiosity which began its exploration of the Mars’ Gale Crater in 2012. Curiosity has been studying the wet phase in Mars’ geological history when the crater held a very large lake.

Perseverance is using its 23 cameras and instrumentation packages to study Jezzero Crater which also exhibits past water features including a river delta. It is tasked with collecting surface samples for a future mission to collect and return to Earth. It also delivered a helicopter named Ingenuity to Mars. Although the helicopter was initially a demonstrator to prove the feasibility of flight in the Martian atmosphere, in passing its first few tests with literally flying colours, has now been given an extended mission. The combination of helicopter and rover is quite intriguing. Perseverance has one additional demonstration technology. Called MOXIE, it has already started working harvesting oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere. This will be critical technology when human explorers go to Mars sometime in the 2030s.

Zhurong landed on Utopia Planitia, southwest of the location where Viking 2 landed back in 1976. Its instrumentation includes a mast camera for navigation, a laser to zap and study the chemistry of rocks, and a ground-penetrating radar that can see to a depth of 100 meters (330 feet) below the surface, ten times the depth of the radar aboard Perseverance. And Zhurong also has the companion Tainwen-1 orbiter above which may help to plan where it goes. The mission plan calls for the rover to last 90 Martian days but I would suspect it will endure far longer as have all NASA’s rovers beginning with Sojourn, the first demonstration of a rover on the Red Planet’s surface.

A quick summary of past rover mission on Mars:

• Sojourner operated for 92 Martian days or sols.
• Spirit lasted 2,249 sols.
• Opportunity lasted 5,352 sols.
• Curiosity is still operating after 3,319 sols
• Perseverance has only just begun its mission and has been on the surface for 84 sols.