“Congratulations to CNSA’s #Tianwen1 team for the successful landing of China’s first Mars exploration rover, #Zhurong! Together with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity’s understanding of the Red Planet.”
So says Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator, NASA Science Mission Directorate, a few minutes ago. China has announced that her lander and rover have landed, but that’s all the info we have. They didn’t even announce the lander separating from the orbiter or entering the seven minutes of terror. We were all guessing. We’ll have to guess a while longer to find out what actually happened.
TTG
I note that a Macau commenter on the tianwen1 twitter feed that you linked to claims the landing point was “less than 40km from target location”. How does that rank with Perseverance or Curiosity steering accuracy at landing?
I doubt the landing was as accurate as Perseverance, but I don’t know if the Tianwen-1 site was 40 km from the initially planned site which could have been adjusted during the weeks of orbital reconnaissance or 40 km from where they were finally aiming for. For comparison, Perseverance had a landing target eclipse of 7.7 X 6.6 km. It had terrain relative navigation which I think allowed it to made adjustments to its final landing site to within 40 meters. So no, the Tianwen-1 landing wasn’t as precise as Perseverance. But it’s not bad for a first attempt… if it actually was successful.
China landed their rover on Mars. Is this gonna be a Sputnik moment for the woke USA? Or is the US body politic so focused on navel gazing that it is on it’s way down to irrelevance?
They chose the same place we put the Viking lander in the 70s, at place that seems about the best place to look for water ice on Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_Planitia