Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

China’s first Mars rover to be named after the fire god Zhurong

Georgina Torbet
By
A Long March-5 rocket, carrying an orbiter, lander, and rover as part of the Tianwen-1 mission to Mars, lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in southern China’s Hainan Province on July 23, 2020. Noel Celis/Getty Images

NASA’s Perseverance rover will soon have a new companion on the red planet, as China is set to send its first Mars rover to the planet’s surface as early as next month. The Tianwen-1 mission launched in July last year, arriving at Mars in February this year, and the spacecraft has already shared an image of Mars taken as it approached its destination. But the real challenge of the mission is still ahead, with the plan to land a rover on the planet in May or June.

China’s space agency, the China National Space Administration (CNSA), recently announced the name for the little machine which is set to become China’s first Mars rover. It will be called Zhurong, after a fire god from traditional Chinese legends.

Recommended Videos

The name was announced at the 2021 China Space Conference in Nanjing. The name was chosen to compliment the Chinese name for Mars, Huoxing, which means planet of fire.

Related

“Naming China’s first Mars rover after the god of fire signifies igniting the flame of China’s planetary exploration,” said Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the CNSA, as reported by Chinese state media agency Xinhua. He also described how the name Zhurong is made up of the terms “Zhu,” meaning wish, and “Rong,” meaning cooperation, in the spirit of the peaceful exploration of space.

Landing a rover on Mars is extremely challenging, due to not only the thin atmosphere and variable wind and dust storms but also due to the communication delay between the planet and Earth. This means that rovers must land autonomously, without being guided in real time.

CNSA estimates that the landing process of Zhurong will take seven to eight minutes, in which the craft will make use of a parachute and retrorocket to slow its descent through the atmosphere and aim for a soft landing on the surface. The landing area in the southern region of Utopia Planitia, the largest impact basin on Mars, was explored by the NASA Viking 2 lander in the 1970s.

The Tianwen-1 mission aims to investigate this area to learn about the surface and sub-surface of the region, including its composition and the presence of water ice there.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Mars Curiosity rover finds evidence of water where it was expected to be dry
Curiosity Rover

The key to understanding whether Mars was ever habitable is water. For life as we know it to thrive, liquid water needs to be present -- and we know that even though it is now dry, there was once liquid water on the surface of Mars. However, the history of water on Mars is complex, and scientists are still debating exactly how long water was present there and when the planet dried up.

And it's about to get more complex. Recently, the Curiosity rover has made an intriguing discovery suggesting that water was once present in an area that scientists had thought would be dry.

Read more
Mars helicopter Ingenuity marks 40 flights and is still going strong
Ingenuity sits on a slightly inclined surface with about 6-degree tilt at the center of the frame, just north of the southern ridge of “Séíitah” geologic unit. The Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument took this image on Dec. 1, 2021, when the rotorcraft was about 970 feet (295 meters) away.

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity has made its third flight of the year, which also marks its 40th flight since it landed in the Jezero crater along with the Perseverance rover in February 2021. Despite being originally intended for just five flights and having to weather the Martian winter, the little helicopter is still going strong as it comes up to its second anniversary on the red planet.

On the helicopter's 40th flight, it traveled from an area named Airfield Z to Airfield Beta, on its way to join the Perseverance rover as it explores the Jezero river delta. It will help scout ahead for the rover, identifying safe routes for the rover to drive as it searches for evidence of ancient life that could have existed when water was present on the planet's surface billions of years ago.

Read more
Perseverance rover celebrates its first Martian birthday
mars 2020 perseverance rover

The Perseverance rover currently exploring Mars recently celebrated a milestone: its first Martian year since landing. Though the rover landed in the Jezero Crater in February 2021, making it almost two Earth years old, NASA measures its Mars missions in Martian years. As Mars orbits further from the sun than the Earth does, it has longer years, at 687 days, so the rover hit its first Martian birthday this week on January 6.

The end of Perseverance's first Martian year also marks the end of its primary mission, as the rover was designed to operate for one Martian year minimum. But the rover is still healthy and going strong, so it immediately began its extended mission in which it will continue to explore the crater for evidence of ancient life and to collect samples of Martian rock and regolith.

Read more