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Tianwen-1 Mars Rover

China successfully launched its first Mars probe, named Tianwen-1, via a Long March-5 Y4 carrier rocket from Wenchang Space Launch Center in South China’s Hainan Province into planned trajectory on 23 July 2020. The launch heralded a new era in China’s deep-space exploration, which had steadily progressed beyond moon probes to interplanetary missions. Launch on a Long March 5 launcher was expected from Wenchang early in the short launch window to Mars open in late July and early August 2020. The Tianwen-1 Mars probe, which weighs about five tons, is also the heaviest deep space probe that China has ever sent into space, and is one ton heavier than the Chang’e-4 lunar probe, which China successfully sent to the dark side of the moon in January 2019

China named its first independent interplanetary mission Tianwen-1, with the combined Mars orbiter and rover spacecraft apparently proceeding towards launch in July. The name and mission logo were unveiled at a China National Space Administration online ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the launch of the country’s first satellite. DFH-1 launched on a Long March 1 rocket from Jiuquan April 24, 1970, making China the fifth country to independently launch a satellite.

No country other than China has ever set the goals of orbiting, landing and roving the Red Planet in its first mission attempt. Only a handful of Mars missions have been able to land on the planet and conduct roving explorations.

Tianwen-1, meaning ‘questions to heaven’, was taken from the name of a long-form poem by Qu Yuan, a poet born in the fourth century BC. The Heavenly Questions or Questions to Heaven is a piece contained in the Classical Chinese poetry collection of Chu Ci, which is noted both in terms of poetry and as a source for information on the ancient culture of China, especially the area of the ancient state of Chu. "Questions of Heaven" is the quintessence of Qu Yuan ’s ideological doctrine, and all the questions are inexplicable strange things and big things in ancient legends. These questions are also the questions explored by many scholars since the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. Almost all of them have been discussed in the articles of hundreds of schools. Qu Zi's "Question of the Sky" is a confusing sentence, with a questioning tone to make it so.

The ‘Lanxingjiutian’ logo includes representations of the Latin letter ‘c’, referring to China, cooperation, and the cosmic velocity required to undertake planetary exploration. Further Chinese planetary missions would also carry the Tianwen name.

The test launch of the Long March 5B — expected in early May — would likely need to succeed for the Tianwen-1 mission to proceed. Following that mission, the Yuanwang-21 and -22 cargo vessels would collect the components of the Long March 5 for Tianwen-1 from Tianjin, north China, for delivery to Wenchang on the southern island of Hainan.

The Tianwen-1 orbiter would be equipped with a high-resolution camera comparable to HiRise on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It also carries a medium-resolution camera, subsurface radar, mineralogy spectrometer, neutral and energetic particle analyzers and a magnetometer. The orbiter would also play a relay role for the mission rover.

The roughly 240-kilogram solar-powered rover was nearly twice the mass of China’s Yutu lunar rovers. It would carry a ground-penetrating radar, multispectral camera, a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy instrument and payloads for detecting the climate and magnetic environment. The rover has a mission design lifetime of three Earth months. The rover would receive a name through a public vote closer to launch.

China has outlined two landing areas, with a candidate landing site in Utopia Planitia. The landing ellipse was understood to be around 100 x 40 kilometers. Site selection was driven by a range of factors including flight system engineering constraints and the challenges of entry, descent and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet, and the science goals of the mission.

The Tianwen-1 spacecraft was expected to reach Mars around February 2021. However, the rover landing attempt may not take place immediately. There are suggestions that the landing segment of the mission would be conducted months later, in April. This would allow mapping and observation of the landing site, despite the availability of high-resolution NASA imagery from HiRise.

The Tianwen-1 mission would join NASA’s Perseverance Mars 2020 rover and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars orbiter, which this week shipped to its launch site in Japan, in launching during the July-August Mars launch window. ESA’s Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover has been delayed to the next opportunity in 2022.

The newly built 70-meter antenna is a wheel-rail fully movable Cassegrain antenna, and the working frequency bands are S, X With Ku, the total weight is about 2700 tons, the height is 72 meters, the main reflective surface is 70 meters in diameter, and it consists of 16 circles of a total of 1328 high-precision solid panels, with an area equivalent to 9 basketball courts. It started construction in October 2018 and plans to complete acceptance in 2020. When completed, it will become the largest single-aperture fully movable antenna in Asia, providing a solid foundation for China's deep space exploration.

Tianwen-1, China’s first Mars probe, successfully reached the Red Planet on 10 February 2021 at around 7:52 pm, homing in on the Earth’s planetary neighbor after an epic seven-month journey of nearly 500 million kilometers. After a 15-minute firing of its 3,000-newton thrust engine, the spacecraft reached an elliptical Mars orbit at around 400 kilometers from the planet. It will carry out several orbital course corrections before finally selecting a landing spot and touching down, which is scheduled to happen between May and June. Possible landing sites include the largest plain on Mars, known as the Utopia Planitia.

China landed the spacecraft on Mars 15 May 2021, becoming the second country to put a rover on the planet. The six-wheeled rover, Zhurong, named after a god of fire in Chinese mythology, reached Utopia Planitia, a large plain in Mars' northern hemisphere. It's also where NASA's Viking 2 landed in 1976. The rover used a combination of a parachute, a protective capsule, and a rocket platform to make the descent. China's Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter will relay its signal to the rover during its mission and conduct a global survey of the planet for one Martian year.

As Zhurong Mars rover embarks on its mission to explore the surface of the Red Planet for at least 3 Martian months, approximately 92 days on Earth, the chief designer of China's first Mars exploration mission shared the vision for the next goals under a national plan called "planetary exploration," which is to send more Tianwen-series probes to planets, including Mars and Jupiter, to collect samples and carry out key technology research. Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China's first Mars exploration mission said the next is to send Tianwen-2, Tianwen-3 and more probes to Mars and other planets such as Jupiter to explore and collect samples, which is under a national project called "planetary exploration." "We will carry out research on key technologies so we can return samples from Mars in the early stages and further solidify our key technologies," Zhang said. "Once the project is approved by the country, we will try our best to complete it as soon as possible in accordance with the 'Chinese speed'," Zhang said.