EPA-EFE
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What happened to China’s Zhurong Mars rover? Many planetary scientists and space experts wonder that. The device should have come out of hibernation weeks ago, but so far the rover shows no sign of life. The Chinese space agency, meanwhile, is keeping quiet about the status of the Mars rover.
Zhurong landed on the red planet in May 2021 as part of China’s Tianwen-1 mission, the country’s first interplanetary mission to include a Mars satellite. The rover spent a year researching before winter set in on Mars and the rover went into hibernation mode because of the low temperatures. If it is too cold, the robot cannot charge its batteries properly.
The rover was expected to wake up last December, at the dawn of spring on Mars, but the first reports surfaced in early January that flight control was still waiting for an initial signal. Now that things are still quiet, fears are growing that Zhurong will not be heard from at all.
That wouldn’t be surprising, says astrobiologist David Flannery, involved with NASA’s perseverance rover, on the site of Nature. “There’s a long history of solar-powered landers and rovers on Mars that ran out of power.” Last month, NASA announced that it had to say goodbye to the InSight lander, which could no longer generate enough power after a dust storm: the solar panels were covered with Martian sand.
CNSA
The latter could also be the case with Zhurong. If there is too much dust on the solar panels, it will not be possible to charge the batteries. The rover does have a mechanism to shake off the dust, but that only works when the car is active.
Some remain optimistic. In the coming months, when it gets warmer, Zhurong may still be able to charge his batteries sufficiently and come out of sleep mode. For this, it must be at least -15 degrees Celsius and the batteries must be able to generate at least 140 watts. According to measurements from the American Perseverance rover, which is driving around more than 1500 kilometers away, the temperature is now slightly higher.
In addition to Zhurong’s radio silence, Chinese flight control has recently lost contact with the satellite in orbit around Mars. Although both spacecraft have not yet been written off, they completed their primary mission last year. This makes the mission for China a great success anyway.
