Monday, May 17, 2021

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.


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…

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  (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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