Shanghai, China:
China’s Mars rover drove from its landing platform and started exploring the surface on Saturday, state-run Xinhua news agency mentioned, producing the nation 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 important milestone in China’s space programme.
Tianwen-1 touched down on a vast northern lava plain recognized as the Utopia Planitia a week ago and beamed back its initially photographs of the surface a couple of days later.
The Mars probe and rover are anticipated to commit about 3 months taking photographs, harvesting geographical information, and collecting and analysing rock samples.
The six-wheeled, solar-powered, 240-kilogramme (530-pound) Zhurong is named just 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 competitors for dominion of space.
The United States and Russia are the only other nations 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 previous, most lately in 2016 with the crash-landing of the Schiaparelli joint Russian-European spacecraft.
The most recent prosperous arrival came in February, when US space agency NASA landed its rover Perseverance, which has due to the fact been exploring the planet.
The US rover launched a compact robotic helicopter on Mars which was the initially-ever powered flight on a different planet.
China has come a lengthy way in its race to catch up with the United States and Russia, whose astronauts and cosmonauts have decades of encounter in space exploration.
It effectively launched the initially module of its new space station last month with hopes of getting it crewed by 2022 and at some point sending humans to the Moon.
Last week a segment of the Chinese Long March 5B rocket disintegrated more than the Indian Ocean in an uncontrolled landing back to Earth.
That drew criticism from the United States and other nations for a breach of etiquette governing the return of space debris to Earth, with officials saying the remnants had the possible to endanger life and house.
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