'Nine minutes of terror' as China becomes second country to land on Mars



China has landed a spacecraft on Mars for the first time, become the second country to arrive on the Red Planet.

The Tianwen-1 vessel has touched down in an icy area of Mars known as Utopia Planitia.

On social media, the official Xinhua news agency declared: "China has left a footprint on Mars for the first time, an important step for our country's space exploration."

Meanwhile, China Space News said there was "nine minutes of terror" as the landing module entered the martian atmosphere, decelerating and slowly descending to the surface.

A solar-powered rover called Zhurong, which is about the size of a small car, will now survey the landing site before conducting inspections.

It is named after a mythical Chinese god of fire and is equipped with six scientific instruments, including a high-resolution topography camera.

A ground-penetrating radar is set to look for signs of ancient life and sub-surface water and ice.

Tianwen-1 (which means "Questions to Heaven" in English) blasted off from the southern Chinese island of Hainan last July.

It reached the Red Planet in February and had been in orbit since.

America's Perseverance rover successfully touched down in February in a huge depression known as Jezero Crater, which is about 1,242 miles (2,000km) away from Utopia Planitia.

Another spacecraft launched by the United Arab Emirates is currently orbiting above Mars and is gathering data on its weather and atmosphere, but is not designed to make a landing.

According to Xinhua, China is "not looking to compete for leadership in space", but is committed to "unveiling the secrets of the universe and contributing to humanity's peaceful use of space".

Beijing has landed on the moon before, but successfully touching down on Mars is a much more difficult undertaking.

 

China successfully lands a rover on Mars

China has successfully landed a rover on Mars, joining the U.S. and the former Soviet Union as the only other countries to land on the red planet. CBSN contributor Isaac Stone Fish, the founder of Strategy Risks, spoke with Lana Zak about what this means for the future of space exploration.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LANA ZAK: In space watch, China has successfully landed a rover on Mars, joining the US and the former Soviet Union as the only other countries to land on the Red Planet. The China National Space Administration says it took more than 17 minutes after landing the rover to send signals to ground controllers. Now that it's on Mars, it will collect data from the planet's soil and atmosphere. The rover is equipped with six scientific instruments, including a high-resolution topography camera.

For more now, I want to bring in CBSN contributor Isaac Stone Fish. Isaac is the founder of Strategy Risks, which provides research and analysis on China's impact on businesses. Isaac, usually when we are talking about US-China relations, we're talking about some of these bigger issues that feel more zero-sum. It's nice, actually, to switch gears a little bit. I'm hoping you can tell us just how big of an achievement is this and what this means in terms of Chinese space exploration.

ISAAC STONE FISH: It is nice. This is, compared to the other stories that we often talk about, like you were saying, much more benign and a really great achievement that shows, in many ways, the ingenuity-- I would argue less about the Chinese Communist Party and more about many of the brilliant Chinese scientists who made this happen.

LANA ZAK: Yeah, and on that note, how does China's landing on Mars affect US space exploration, global space exploration? Do you think that this will prompt other countries to continue investing more in potential scientific technologies that might benefit all of humankind?

ISAAC STONE FISH: I hope so. There's so many comparisons drawn between the US and China today to the US and the Soviet Union, and it's difficult to know how much the space race that the US fought and won against the Soviet Union will replicate itself with the US and China today. So what China did by successfully landing a rover on Mars was something that the United States did in the '70s, so it's not a Sputnik moment-- a reference to that famous satellite launch that the Soviets did in the '50s that really sped up US scientific research and development. But this is certainly a sign that China is playing this game at a very, very high level.

LANA ZAK: Well, let's get into some of the nitty-gritty details. Tell us where the rover landed, how scientists were able to get it to its destination, and anything more about, you know, in comparison, as you were starting to bring up, to the other times that we actually had either the Soviet or the US rovers there to try and advance some of this scientific exploration.

ISAAC STONE FISH: The lander landed on what is called Utopia Plane. And scientists in the US and in China described the landing part as seven minutes of terror and nine minutes of terror because that's often the most challenging part of the entire process, getting the details exactly right when you have so, so many different variables to figure out to really land that landing.

And what this rover seems to be wanting to do is trying to figure out that really pressing scientific question about the state of water or ice on Mars, the state of life on Mars, and whether or not the ice there could potentially sustain astronauts who are eventually going to visit Mars and then possibly, at some point in the future, sustain human life for the potential for any sort of colonies that might be able to be put there at some point in our lifetime or the lifetime of our children.

LANA ZAK: It is exciting to think about that. And it does seem like this is the latest in many different efforts from countries-- from all different countries to try and advance space exploration and our understanding of the cosmos. How does China's current mission fit into sort of a greater perspective about what China hopes to accomplish, in terms of space goals?

ISAAC STONE FISH: It's very difficult to know if what Beijing says it's looking for in space, which is peaceful development with the rest of the world, is what they're actually looking for or if it is a question of being a great power, being the greatest power, and using potential dominance in space to exert influence over other countries. I think, in many ways, this space race will reflect the US-China tensions more broadly. And the worse things are, the more contentious things will be in space, especially if the NASA space station that's due to be decommissioned in roughly 2024-- unless there's much bigger investment and push on that, it could be that the Chinese, in several years, are the only ones with a functioning space station in space, and that is going to be an intensely political tool for them. And the countries that they work with on that, they are going to exert a political cost for that in other parts of the relationship.

LANA ZAK: Interesting. It may spur a little healthy scientific competition. Isaac Stone Fish, thank you.

ISAAC STONE FISH: Exactly. Thank you.

'Nihao Mars': China's Zhurong rover touches down on Red Planet




'Nihao Mars': China's Zhurong rover touches down on Red Planet

Zhurong: China's Mars surface debut

Sébastien RICCI

China's probe to Mars touched down on the Red Planet early Saturday to deploy its Zhurong rover, state media reported, a triumph for Beijing's increasingly bold space ambitions and a history-making feat for a nation on its first-ever Martian mission.

The lander carrying Zhurong completed the treacherous descent through the Martian atmosphere using a parachute to navigate the "seven minutes of terror" as it is known, aiming for a vast northern lava plain known as the Utopia Planitia.

It "successfully landed in the pre-selected area", state broadcaster CCTV said, launching a special TV programme dedicated to the mission called "Nihao Mars" ("Hello Mars").

The official Xinhua news agency cited the China National Space Administration (CNSA) in confirming the touchdown.

It makes China the first country to carry out an orbiting, landing and roving operation during its first mission to Mars -- a feat unmatched by the only other two nations to reach the Red Planet so far, the US and Russia.

President Xi Jinping sent his "warm congratulations and sincere greetings to all members who have participated in the Mars exploration mission", Xinhua reported.

China has now sent astronauts into space, powered probes to the Moon and landed a rover on Mars, the most prestigious of all prizes in the competition for dominion of space.

- Three-month mission -

Zhurong, named after a Chinese mythical fire god, arrives a few months behind America's latest probe to Mars -- Perseverance -- as the show of technological might between the two superpowers plays out beyond the bounds of Earth.

Six-wheeled, solar-powered and weighing roughly 240 kilograms (530 pounds), the Chinese rover is on a quest to collect and analyse rock samples from Mars' surface.

The launch of China's Tianwen-1 Mars probe which carried the rover last July marked a major milestone in China's space programme.

The spacecraft entered Mars' orbit in February and after a prolonged silence state media announced it had reached the "crucial touchdown stage" on Friday.

The landing was set to be a nail-biter for the China National Space Administration (CNSA), with state media describing the process of using a parachute to slow descent and buffer legs as "the most challenging part of the mission".

It is expected to spend around three months there taking photos and harvesting geographical data.

The complicated landing process is called the "seven minutes of terror" because it happens faster than radio signals can reach Earth from Mars, meaning communications are limited.

"The distance was too far away that the spacecraft has to do it totally by itself," said Chen Lan, an independent analyst specialising in China's space programme. "If there was something wrong, people on the Earth have no way to help."

Several US, Russian and European attempts to land rovers on Mars have failed in the past, most recently in 2016 with the crash-landing of the Schiaparelli joint Russian-European spacecraft.

The latest successful arrival came in February, when US space agency NASA landed its rover Perseverance, which has since been exploring the planet.

The US rover launched a small robotic helicopter on Mars which was the first-ever powered flight on another planet.

China has come a long way in its race to catch up with the United States and Russia, whose astronauts and cosmonauts have decades of experience in space exploration.

It successfully launched the first module of its new space station last month with hopes of having it crewed by 2022 and eventually sending humans to the Moon.

Last week a segment of the Chinese Long March 5B rocket disintegrated over the Indian Ocean in an uncontrolled landing back to Earth.

That drew criticism from the United States and other nations for a breach of etiquette governing the return of space debris to Earth, with officials saying the remnants had the potential to endanger life and property.

burs-apj/leg/mtp

SPACE RACE 2.0 

COMRADES LAND ON THE RED PLANET 
Zhurong rover lands on Mars; China joins US as only nations to successfully land on planet

China became the second country in the world to successfully land a rover on Mars after its Zhurong craft touched down on the red planet.

Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY 

NASA's Mars helicopter heard humming on red planet




Named after the Chinese god of fire, Zhurong was aboard the Tianwen-1 spacecraft that launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in China on July 23, 2020. It entered Mars' orbit in February before finally landing around 7:18 p.m. EDT on Friday.

© Jin Liwang, AP In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, members at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center celebrate after China's Tianwen-1 probe successfully landed on Mars.

It took more than 17 minutes after the rover opened its solar panels and antenna for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth, according to The Associated Press.

China joins the United States as countries that have successfully landed a rover on Mars. A U.S. mission first landed on the planet in 2004 and has the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars.

The Soviet Union landed a probe on Mars, but the spacecraft failed minutes later. The European Space Agency had two spacecrafts crash during attempts to land on the planet.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator at NASA, congratulated the China National Space Administration on Twitter.

"Congratulations to CNSA’s #Tianwen1 team for the successful landing of China’s first Mars exploration rover, #Zhurong! Together with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity’s understanding of the Red Planet," he tweeted.



China's rover will spend about 93 Mars days (about 90 Earth days) surveying an area of the planet known as Utopia Planitia, the same area Perseverance landed on in February. The goal is to look at Mars' composition and evidence of water ice. The rover is about the size of a small car and has a ground-penetrating radar, a laser and sensors to gauge the atmosphere and magnetic sphere.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a congratulatory letter to the mission team, called the landing “an important step in our country’s interplanetary exploration journey, realizing the leap from Earth-moon to the planetary system and leaving the mark of the Chinese on Mars for the first time. ... The motherland and people will always remember your outstanding feats!”

The landing is one of many missions the country hopes to accomplish. China has begun to build a space station. One part of the station successfully launched in April, but China caused some panic a week ago when debris from a rocket flew uncontrollably down to Earth, crashing into the Indian Ocean.




Slides 4 of 19: This illustration made available by NASA shows the rover Opportunity on the surface of Mars. The exploratory vehicle landed on Jan. 24, 2004, and logged more than 28 miles before falling silent during a global dust storm in June 2018. There was so much dust in the Martian atmosphere that sunlight could not reach Opportunity's solar panels for power generation. Wednesday brought considerable sadness combined with a fair amount of pride to the folks at NASA, which pronounced the Mars rover Opportunity dead after a record-setting 15-year run. It had stopped communicating more than eight months ago.

1/19 SLIDES © NASA via AP

Contributing: The Associated Press

Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jord_mendoza.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Zhurong rover lands on Mars; China joins US as only nations to successfully land on planet

Zhurong - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhurong

Zhurong (Chinese: 祝融), also known as Chongli (Chinese: 重黎), is an important personage in Chinese mythology and Chinese folk religion. According to the Huainanzi and the philosophical texts of Mozi and his followers, Zhurong is a god of fire and of the south. The Shanhaijing gives alternative genealogies for Zhurong, including descent from both the Yan Emperor and Yellow Emperor. Some sources ass…

• Genealogy
• Description
• See also
• External links

Character genealogy
One aspect of the traditional Chinese characters used in the case of Zhurong's name is that the character 融 is composed by combining the character 鬲 (lì) which refers to a ritual cauldron or tripodal vessel with three hollow legs, which is well known from archeological reports as a characteristic Chalcolith…

Red Star, 1908/1984. Download.

It seemed to me that in your arms I felt your entire youthful world. Its despotism, its egoism, its desperate thirst for happiness—all of this was in your caresses. Your love is like murder. 

But – I love you, Lenni.

• Alexander Bogdanov, ‎Loren R. Graham, ‎Richard Stites (1908/1984). Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia. p. 9

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VOTING FRAUD DISCOVERED IN USA

'I just thought, give him another vote': 

Man charged with wife's murder illegally cast her ballot for Trump, officials say

Washington Post 

The county clerk immediately knew something strange was going on last fall. A mail ballot had arrived from Suzanne Morphew — a woman missing since May.

© Provided by National Post Barry Morphew was charged with first degree murder this month, in connection with the death of his wife Suzanne Morphew.

“There’s posters all over our town,” said Lori Mitchell, the clerk and recorder in Chaffee County, a Colorado community of about 20,000 rocked by Morphew’s disappearance last Mother’s Day. “Constant things in the news about her. There’s people at the grocery store passing out fliers.”

The ballot didn’t have Morphew’s signature as required, Mitchell said. But someone had signed on the “witness” line: The woman’s husband, Barry Morphew.

“I was stunned,” Mitchell recalled. “I couldn’t believe it. I was like, what in the world is going on?”

For a long time, she said, it was just something fishy that her office reported to law enforcement. Then Barry Morphew was charged this month with murdering his wife. This week, things got stranger still: Barry was also accused of casting his wife’s ballot in a fraudulent vote for President Donald Trump.

Barry echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud as the motivation for his own alleged wrongdoing, according to an affidavit filed Thursday in court. The 53-year-old told FBI agents last month that he did it because “all these other guys are cheating” and said his wife would have backed Trump anyway.

“I just thought, give him another vote,” Barry allegedly said.

It was the latest wild twist in a widely followed missing-person case — publicized in part by Barry’s emotional pleas for his wife’s return — as well as in a presidential race dogged by false claims Trump lost the election due to fraud.

“It’s bonkers,” Mitchell told The Washington Post.

Barry is charged with a felony count of forgery and a misdemeanour count of offences related to mail ballots, court records show, on top of other charges stemming from his wife’s disappearance.

He is being held without bail and due to appear in court later this month, according to online court records, which do not show a plea. He defended himself to local media as suspicions swirled over the past year.

“I love my wife. I would never hurt my wife,” he told news station KDVR last fall. “She is the light of my and my daughters’ lives. This whole thing is killing us and that is why I want our privacy.”

His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Office of the Colorado State Public Defender’s website states that lawyers do not comment on the criminal cases of those they represent.

Barry told authorities he cast his wife’s vote “just because I wanted Trump to win,” according to the affidavit. He allegedly said he “didn’t know you couldn’t do that for your spouse.”

Melinda Moorman, Suzanne’s sister, said in an interview Saturday that she was outraged and perplexed to hear about the allegation from the sheriff.

“To hear that Barry involved himself in voter fraud is beyond comprehension to me,” she told The Post, saying that the family is still reeling from the earlier murder charge.

Moorman said she believed Morphew’s behavior was that of an “insane person.”

“It’s a very difficult thing to wrap our minds around, to believe he could have gotten to this level of evil,” she added. “As a family, we did not want to believe he was capable of this, however, everything points to this happening.”

Barry was arrested on May 5, only a few days shy of the first anniversary of Suzanne’s disappearance, on charges of first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and attempt to influence a public servant.

The search for his wife began on May 10, 2020, when a neighbor reported that 49-year-old Suzanne Morphew did not return from a bike ride.

Barry Morphew told the police he was on a work trip that day, away from their home in Maysville, Colo., about a two-and-a-half hour’s drive southwest of Denver. As authorities scoured the hills of Maysville, Morphew pleaded on camera for his wife’s safe return.

“Oh Suzanne, if anyone is out there that can hear this, that has you, please, we’ll do whatever it takes to bring you back. . . . No questions asked,” he said in the video posted on Facebook. “However much they want. I will do whatever it takes to get you back. Honey, I love you. I want you back so bad.”

A sprawling investigation ensued. More than 70 investigators from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies would eventually execute more than 135 search warrants across the state and interview hundreds of people, according to the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office.

But authorities said they never found Suzanne’s body — just her bicycle and unidentified “personal items,” KCNC reported last May.

One news station, KXRM, interviewed an associate who raised questions about Barry’s alibi from the weekend Suzanne went missing. Jeffrey Puckett — a contractor hired to help with Barry’s business trip — said that Barry’s hotel room smelled of chlorine and that his bed did not appear slept-in, according to KXRM.

Yet the case stretched on without answers until this early month, when Barry was arrested near his home in Poncha Springs, Colo., according to the sheriff’s office and the district attorney for the 11th Judicial District in Colorado. During a news conference, Chaffee County Sheriff John Spezze said “thousands of hours” of work had gone into the search for the woman described as a devoted, loving mother of two.

Then came the charges of illegal voting.

Morphew’s case is not the only allegation of fraudulent Trump votes to emerge amid Republicans’ baseless insistence that electoral wrongdoing boosted President Joe Biden. Last month, a Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to voter fraud charges after he cast a ballot for Trump under his dead mother’s name, after registering with her driver’s license.

Bruce Bartman apologized for his actions and blamed them on pandemic isolation and listening to “too much propaganda,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Two other men in Pennsylvania have been accused of committing voter fraud by casting illegal ballots for Trump, the Inquirer reported.

Trump and his supporters promoted myriad claims of fraud in the 2020 election, challenging the results in lawsuits rejected by at least 86 judges and fueling the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Local, state and federal authorities have said there is no evidence of fraud that could have cost Trump the election.

A Republican congressman who denied there was an insurrection and likened Capitol rioters to tourists was photographed barricading the chamber doors against them
tcolson@businessinsider.com (Thomas Colson) 6 hrs ago

© Photo By Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Rep. Andrew Clyde, center, and security guards barricade the House door as rioters disrupt the joint session of Congress on January 6. Photo By Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images    

A GOP lawmaker who has said there was no insurrection was seen barricading the House on January 6.

Rep. Andrew Clyde said last week that the riot resembled a "normal tourist visit."

But he had been photographed pushing furniture against the chamber's doors.

A photo emerged of a GOP lawmaker who last week downplayed the Capitol siege and compared the rioters to tourists barricading the House doors with furniture on January 6.

Rep. Andrew Clyde said during a House oversight committee hearing on Wednesday that it was a "bald-faced lie" to call the riot an insurrection. He said the riot, in which hundreds of Trump supporters breached the Capitol, resembled a "normal tourist visit."

After Clyde's comments, a photographer shared a photo he had taken of Clyde using furniture to barricade the House against rioters trying to force their way in to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden's election victory. Several people died in the riot.

"The Rep. Clyde news reminded me of this," the photographer, Tom Williams, said on Twitter.

In the hearing last week, Clyde addressed his attempts to barricade the House and suggested that because rioters did not breach the chamber it was not an insurrection.

"As one of the members who stayed in the Capitol and on the House floor and who with other Republican colleagues helped barricade the door until almost 3 p.m. that day from the mob who tried to enter, I can tell you, the House floor was never breached, and it was not an insurrection," he said.

Clyde described the rioters as an "undisciplined mob" but also said they resembled tourists, Insider's Grace Panetta reported.

"You know, if you didn't know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit," he said.

He also falsely claimed that police officers had not confiscated any firearms from people who breached the Capitol.

Read the original article on Business Insider