China's Mars rover is a new chapter

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  China's Mars rover is a new chapter

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• The story: Encased in a lander, the rover touched down shortly after 7 a.m. Beijing time on 15th May, 2021, 10 months after China’s Tianwen-1 mission left Earth. Until the touchdown, the potential landing zone — in a vast impact crater called Utopia Planitia — was thousands of kilometres across, meaning that scientists could only loosely finger sites of possible interest.
• After safe landing: The world came to know the general landing location of China’s Zhurong Mars rover, and scientists rushed to analyse satellite images and geological maps to pinpoint intriguing features. Of significance was a possible mud volcano — a type of landform that no Mars rover has visited before.

1. Images from the rover were not released immediately, and they might not come for weeks, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA). But radio signals sent after the rover unfurled its solar panels suggested that it arrived at the western edge of Utopia Planitia, about 1,800 kilometres northeast of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in February 21. 
2. The lander has probably settled on a fairly smooth, sandy plain dotted with small craters, add researchers. They are now studying existing images of the region taken by spacecraft such as NASA’s Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
3. The site is close to the boundary between Mars’s northern lowlands and southern highlands. NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers also landed close to this region, which might have been the shoreline for an ancient ocean that once covered the planet’s north. 

• The sediments: The priority for scientists is to study the composition of sediments for evidence they have been altered by interaction with water, which would suggest that the area had once been immersed. Some argue that more recent geological processes in the area are likely to have obscured evidence of this ancient water body. Of great interest to scientists is a pitted, cone-shaped feature seen in aerial images, which is about three kilometres northwest of Zhurong’s position: this could be a volcano formed from lava or slurries of mud.

1. On Earth, mud volcanoes are associated with the production of methane by bacteria. Their presence on Mars might help to explain puzzlingly large quantities of methane that had been previously detected in the Martian atmosphere.
2. To find out what the feature is, scientists would like to see the use of a laser-based system tied to Zhurong’s spectrometer, to zap the rocks and analyse their composition, as well as ground-penetrating radar to study structures below the surface.
3. The cone could be beyond Zhurong’s reach. The mission’s goal is to cover a distance of several hundred metres over the next three months, she says — although the rover could stay active for longer.

• Sand dunes and subsurface ice: The area where Zhurong has landed also features large sand dunes that reveal that winds flowed in a southeasterly or northwesterly direction. The site is also likely to contain rocks that were ejected from nearby impact craters, so there will be a few different rock types to explore. Researchers hope to find ice below the surface. The shallow cliffs and troughs that appear in the aerial images are reminiscent of features seen in permafrost-layered regions of Canada and Siberia suggesting that features on Mars might also have been formed by ice-driven processes.
• Moving about: To explore all these features on Mars’s surface, Zhurong can move at speeds of 200 metres per hour. But it is likely that the 240-kilogram rover will move much more slowly. The key challenge will be navigating the complex, rocky landscape autonomously. Even Perseverance — an SUV-sized rover weighing more than a tonne — will probably cover only 100 metres in a day, making it much faster than any other rover before it.
• Equipments carried: The rover carries six science payloads to study the topography, geology, soil structure, minerals and rock types and atmosphere in the area.

1. NaTeCam: A pair of 2048 × 2048 pixel navigation and terrain cameras mounted on the mast of the rover to provide 3D panoramic imaging, assist navigation and study Mars topography and geology.
2. MSCam: A multispectral camera installed on the mast between the NaTeCams to provide information on surface materials and their distribution across nine spectral bands. It covers eight spectral bands as well as visible light.
3. MarSCoDe: The Mars Surface Composition Detector includes a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) spectrometer, which vaporizes rocks to analyze their composition.
4. RoPeR: A penetrating radar picking up echo data to study the soil and potential water ice below the surface. Two frequency channels will probe subsurface layers down to 10 meters with centimeter-level vertical resolution and to 100m with 1m resolution, respectively. 
5. RoMAG: A mast-mounted magnetometer for measuring the magnetic field. It will work together with another magnetometer aboard the orbiter.
6. MCS: The Mars Climate Station combines a number of sensors to collect data on temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction.

• Knowledge centre:

1. Utopia Planitia - It means the "Nowhere Land Plain". It is a large plain within Utopia, the largest recognized impact basin on Mars (and also in the Solar System) with an estimated diameter of 3300 km. The Viking 2 lander touched down here, in Sept 1976. The Chinese Zhurong rover touched down on 14 May, 2021, as a part of the Tianwen-1 mission. Its antipode is the Argyre Planitia, a basin possibly formed by a giant impact during the Late Heavy Bombardment of the early Solar System, approximately 3.9 billion years ago.
2. Mars lack of magnetic field - Earth's magnetism comes from within, but Mars' does not. Earth's magnetism comes from its core, where molten, electrically conducting iron flows beneath the crust. Its magnetic field is global, meaning it surrounds the entire planet. Billions of years ago, Mars used to have a global magnetic field, but it shut down for reasons that are still unknown, about 4 billion years ago, leaving the atmosphere unshielded to radiation and causing it to bleed over time into space.

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