Last week, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that their Martian orbiter and rover, Tianwen-1 and Zhurong, have both completed their “targeted scientific exploration missions.” That’s pretty impressive for a country’s first mission to a distant world, but we’ve already seen the amazing work China has been doing on the Moon, so it’s not all that surprising.

To honor the occasion, China sent out a press release detailing the accomplishments of Tianwen-1. The orbiter itself has been operating nominally for 706 days, and in that time, has acquired medium-resolution data covering the entirety of the red planet. The orbiter has circled Mars, per the press release, 1,344 times.

As for Zhurong, the rover touched down on May 15, 2021, in Utopia Planitia and began roving on May 22. It completed its initial 90-day mission on August 15 and has since continued exploring the surface. So far, the rover has traveled almost 2,000 meters. In May of this year, the rover switched to ‘dormant mode’ because of the approaching Martian winter. Operations are expected to resume in December when the weather warms up again.

Between the orbiter and the rover, over 1,000 gigabytes of data have been acquired using thirteen scientific payloads between the two craft. And the CNSA has shared that data with both NASA and the European Space Agency while also participating in collision forecasts to make sure everyone’s spacecraft stay safe in orbit. CNSA also plans to make the scientific data available to scientists worldwide.

Next for Tianwen-1 will be a whole-planet remote sensing survey as well as some expanded technology experiments.

We look forward to bringing you more results from this mission.

More Information

China Focus: China’s Mars probe completes targeted exploration (Xinhua)