The fate of China’s first Mars rover “Zhurong” is uncertain. A month after the vehicle was expected to wake up from a planned “hibernation”, there is no sign of life for now. However, experts do not want to give up hope that the rover, named after the Chinese fire god, will start up again.
China’s space agency has not commented on the status of the rover. State media described foreign reports that “Zhurong” could have a problem as “hyped up”. Political motives were suggested, speaking of an attempt to “undermine” progress in China’s space program.
Rover was put into ‘hibernation’ in May
The rover was hibernated in May 2022 for the cold, dusty winter on the red planet. Now there is concern that “Zhurong” may not have survived the harsh sandstorms because too much sand has settled on the shade sails. The rover would wake up automatically when the power level reaches more than 140 watts and the temperature of the battery rises above minus 15 degrees Celsius.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if the rover doesn’t wake up from sleep because it’s solar powered, and there’s a long history of solar powered landers and rovers on Mars running out of power,” said David Flannery of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, to Nature magazine. The astrobiologist works in the team of the American Mars rover “Perseverance”.
Other experts remain optimistic that temperatures will rise and that the solar cells will still be able to absorb enough sunlight. “It’s too early to say anything is wrong,” said Baptiste Chide, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who also collaborates on Perseverance. However, the fact that the Chinese space program is not expressing itself is “strange,” quoted “Nature” from a Chinese employee of the “Zhurong” team, who did not want to be named.
“Zhurong” landed in mid-May 2021 in a region called Utopia Planitia. The flight makes China only the second spacefaring country after the United States to successfully deploy a reconnaissance vehicle to the Red Planet.
Mission is already considered a great success
The mission is already considered a success as all planned projects have been carried out. The rover traversed the surface of the red planet for nearly two kilometers, gaining a lot of scientific knowledge, finding traces of former water resources and operating for three months longer than planned.
In December, the United States retired the solar-powered Mars lander InSight after four years of being unable to make contact with it. The US space agency NASA had concluded that the batteries no longer provided sufficient power – probably due to too much dust on the solar modules (photo above).
Source: Krone
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