Tianwen-1 Mars landing a success
Print Edition
A CHINESE spacecraft streaked down through the Martian sky on Saturday, becoming the country’s first probe to land on another planet.
The lander, carrying a Mars rover, touched down at its pre-selected landing area in the southern part of Utopia Planitia, a vast plain on the northern hemisphere of Mars, at 7:18am, the China National Space Administration announced.
It took ground controllers more than an hour to establish the success of the pre-programmed landing. They had to wait for the rover to autonomously unfold its solar panels and antenna to send the signals after landing, and there was a time delay of more than 17 minutes due to the 320-million-km distance between Earth and Mars.
“The Mars landing of the Tianwen-1 mission has been a total success,” Zhang Kejian, head of the CNSA, announced at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, to loud cheers.
Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China’s first Mars exploration mission, said that the landing had been a textbook case of accuracy. “Today’s success is hard-won,” he noted.
More than 40 Mars missions have been launched since the 1960s, but only about half have succeeded. The success rate for landing is even lower.
The landing marks an important step in China’s interstellar exploration and a leap from the exploration of the Earth-moon system to interplanetary exploration, said Chinese President Xi Jinping in a congratulatory message.
“The landing left a Chinese mark on Mars for the first time. It is another landmark progress in China’s space industry development,” said Xi.
It was the first time in the world that orbiting and landing on Mars was completed in one mission, said Ye Peijian, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Tianwen-1, consisting of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, was launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Hainan Island on July 23, 2020.
The name Tianwen, meaning Questions to Heaven, comes from a poem written by Qu Yuan (circa 340-278 BC). The Mars rover is named Zhurong after the god of fire.
The spacecraft entered the Mars orbit in February after a journey of nearly seven months through space, and spent about three months surveying potential landing sites.
In the early hours of Saturday, the spacecraft began to descend from its parking orbit, and the entry capsule enclosing the lander and the rover separated from the orbiter at about 4am. After flying for approximately three hours, the entry capsule hurtled toward the red planet and entered the Mars atmosphere at an altitude of 125km, initiating the riskiest phase of the whole mission.
First, the specially designed aerodynamic shape of the entry capsule decelerated with the friction of the Martian atmosphere. When the velocity of the spacecraft was lowered from 4.8km per second to about 460 meters per second, a huge parachute covering an area of about 200 square meters was unfurled to continue reducing the velocity to less than 100 meters per second.
The parachute and the outer shield of the spacecraft were then jettisoned, exposing the lander and rover, and the retrorocket on the lander was fired to further slow the speed of the craft to almost zero.
At about 100 meters above the Martian surface, the craft hovered to identify obstacles and measured the slopes of the surface. Avoiding the obstacles, it selected a relatively flat area and descended slowly, touching down safely with its four buffer legs.
The craft’s plummet through the Martian atmosphere, lasting about nine minutes, was extremely complicated with no ground control, and had to be performed by the spacecraft autonomously, said Geng Yan, an official at the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the CNSA.
After separating from the entry capsule, the orbiter, with a designed lifespan of one Martian year (about 687 days on Earth), was lifted to return to its parking orbit and helped relay communications between the landing vehicle and Earth.
The six-wheeled solar-powered rover, resembling a blue butterfly and with a mass of 240kg, has an expected lifespan of at least 90 days.
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