China and the space expansion.
On the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, Beijing gave itself a beautiful gift: its first landing on Mars. Perched on a small platform, his rover Zhurong (name of a fire deity in Chinese mythology) touched down on the Red Planet on Saturday, May 15 at 1:18 a.m. PST. President Xi Jinping immediately addressed a word of congratulations to the team responsible for the mission, saluting, with grandiloquence, this crucial success for China's solar system exploration program, which leaves "the Chinese footprint on Mars for the future." first time… The motherland and the people will always remember your exceptional exploits! "
After spending three months around Mars in the company of the Tianwen-1 mission orbiter - the time to analyze the terrain and select a suitable site - the lander-rover pair therefore succeeded in overcoming all the difficulties encountered. 'involves entry into the Martian atmosphere, an obstacle course dubbed "the seven minutes of terror" by NASA. Since Mars is currently 320 million kilometers from Earth and a command, even traveling at the speed of light, takes almost eighteen minutes to travel that distance, the whole maneuver must be done. automatically. One failure and that's the crash guaranteed, as the European Space Agency bitterly experienced in 2016, with the failure of its Schiaparelli demonstrator.
Until this day, the United States was the only nation having succeeded in placing astromobiles on Mars: Sojourner in 1997, Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, Curiosity in 2012 and Perseverance in February 2021. Zhurong therefore breaks this “monopoly”, while waiting for the European rover Rosalind-Franklin of the ExoMars mission to try its luck in 2023. NASA has also shown itself to be a good player through the voice of its scientific missions manager, Thomas Zurbuchen, who congratulated on Twitter the Chinese space agency for its first Martian success. “Together with the global scientific community, I welcome the important contributions that this mission will make to the understanding of the Red Planet.
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