China to land its rover on Mars tonight for its first interplanetary mission
The Zhurong rover will aim for the same spot as NASA s 1976 Viking lander
If the mission is a success, China will be the third country to land on Mars
It will also be the first country to carry out an orbiting, landing and roving operation during its first mission to Mars
China is set to land its Zhurong rover on Mars on Friday as part of the country s first interplanetary mission.
Officials revealed Thursday that the capsule will embark on its seven minutes of terror around 7:11pm ET, which is the same tumultuous conditions endured by NASA s Perseverance rover earlier this year.
Zhurong, named after an ancient god of fire, is tucked in the belly of China s Tianwen-1 spacecraft that entered parking orbit around Mars in February.
The rover will descend into the thin atmosphere tomorrow and attempt to land in the same area as NASA s 1976 Viking 2 lander.
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“To me, Mars is the uncanny valley of Earth,” said planetary geophysicist Kevin Lewis of Johns Hopkins University. “It’s similar but was shaped by different processes. It feels so unnatural to our terrestrial experience.”
In a 2019 paper in Science, NASA researchers detail how they repurposed sensors used to drive the Curiosity rover and turned them into gravimeters, which measure changes in gravitational pull. That enabled them to measure the subtle tug from rock layers on lower Mount Sharp, which rises 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the base of Gale Crater and which Curiosity has been climbing since 2014. The results? It turns out the density of those rock layers is much lower than expected.
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IMAGE: A river-fed sedimentary plain in Iceland bears resemblance to what might have fed Mars Gale Crater more than 3 billion years ago. Researchers at Rice University studied rover data on. view more
Credit: Photo by Michael Thorpe
HOUSTON - (Jan. 20, 2021) - Once upon a time, seasons in Gale Crater probably felt something like those in Iceland. But nobody was there to bundle up more than 3 billion years ago.
The ancient Martian crater is the focus of a study by Rice University scientists comparing data from the Curiosity rover to places on Earth where similar geologic formations have experienced weathering in different climates.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
This artist s concept features NASA s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars past or present ability to sustain microbial life.
It has been 3,000 Martian days or sols since the Curiosity rover landed on Mars on August 6, 2012. NASA s rover was sent to make discoveries about the red planet, particularly on its gradual climb up the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain Mount Sharp that it has been exploring since 2014.
But as the Curiosity rover continued to ascend Mount Sharp, it has found distinct benchlike rock formations and took a panoramic photo on November 18, 2020.
Curiosity Rover s 3000th Day on Mars