China has successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars, state media announced early on Saturday. The six-wheeled Zhurong robot was targeting Utopia Planitia, a vast terrain in the planet’s northern hemisphere.
The vehicle used a combination of a protective capsule, a parachute and a rocket platform to make the descent. The successful touchdown is a remarkable achievement, given the difficult nature of the task.
Plans call for a rover to stay in the lander for a few days of diagnostic tests before rolling down a ramp to explore an icy area of Mars known as Utopia Planitia. It will join an American one that arrived at the red planet in February.
China’s first Mars landing follows its launch last month of the main section of what will be a permanent space station and a mission that brought back rocks from the moon late last year.
“China has left a footprint on Mars for the first time, an important step for our country’s space exploration,” Xinhua said in announcing the landing on one of its social media accounts.
The U.S. has had nine successful landings on Mars since 1976. The Soviet Union landed on the planet in 1971, but the mission failed after the craft stopped transmitting information soon after touchdown.
China’s space engineers closing gap with US counterparts
While lagging NASA’s landings by more than four decades, China’s Mars success shows the country’s space engineers are quickly closing the gap with their U.S. counterparts.
“It’s the most difficult place in the solar system to land,” said Emily Lakdawalla, author of “The Design and Engineering of Curiosity,” about the NASA rover that landed in 2012. China’s success on its first attempt “tells you that they are one of the most capable space agencies,” she said.
When landing on the moon, spacecraft can use rockets to slow their descent as they approach the lunar surface. That’s possible because the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere. For returns to Earth, spacecraft reentering the atmosphere can deploy parachutes to glide slowly down through the air.
Unlike the moon, Mars has an atmosphere, which makes it difficult to use rockets to decelerate. However, the Martian atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, making it harder to rely on parachutes.
Touching down on Mars requires a huge deceleration in a very short time, said Nilton Renno, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.
