China’s Mars rover starts roaming the Red Planet

China’s Mars rover starts roaming the Red Planet

China’s Mars rover drove from its landing platform and began exploring the surface yesterday, state-run Xinhua news agency said, making the country only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet. The launch last July of the Tianwen-1 Mars probe, which carried the Zhurong rover, marked a major milestone in China’s space program. Tianwen-1 touched down on a vast northern lava plain known as the Utopia Planitia a week ago and beamed back its first photos of the surface a few days later.

The Mars probe and rover are expected to spend around three months taking photos, harvesting geographical data, and collecting and analyzing rock samples. The six-wheeled, solar-powered, 240-kilogramme (530-pound) Zhurong is named after a Chinese mythical fire god. China has now sent astronauts into space, powered probes to the Moon and landed a rover on Mars-the most prestigious of all prizes in the competition for dominion of space. The United States and Russia are the only other countries to have reached Mars, and only the former has operated a rover on the surface.

Several US, Russian and European attempts to land rovers on Mars have failed in the past, most recently in 2016 with the