China is about to try a high-stakes landing on Mars
Tianwen-1, China’s first mission to orbit the red planet, is set to release a rover called Zhurong on a harrowing descent to the surface.
ByAndrew Jones
Email
China is all set to attempt its first landing on another planet. After months in orbit around Mars, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft will deposit a rover called Zhurong on the surface of Mars. If successful, China will become the second country in history to explore the Martian surface with a rover.
Tianwen-1 arrived at Mars on February 10, marking the arrival of China’s first independent interplanetary mission. Since then, Tianwen-1 has been making close approaches to Mars every 49 hours as it flies in an elliptical orbit around the planet, each time taking high-resolution images of the landing site in Utopia Planitia, a vast plain that may once have been covered by an ancient Martian ocean.
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Using this telescope allowed the team of US and French scientists to reveal the conditions under which these sedimentary beds first formed.
Moving up through the terrain, which is several hundred feet thick, the types of bed change radically, the team explained.
Lying above the lake-deposited clays that form the base of Mount Sharp, wide, tall, cross-bedded structures are a sign of the migration of wind-formed dunes.
These dunes would have formed during a long, dry climate episode, thought to have been common and interspersing shorter, wet periods.
Mars shifted between long dry periods and wetter eras before completely drying up to the nearly dead world we see today about three billion years ago, study shows
Mars swung between humid and arid conditions before it dried up newscientist.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newscientist.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.