Tianwen-1 / Zhurong

In the early morning of 15 May 2021, Beijing time, the control hall at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center fell silent. Hundreds of millions of kilometres away, a capsule had separated from the Tianwen-1 orbiter and was falling toward Mars. Radio signals took roughly seventeen minutes to cross that gulf, so the entire descent, from atmospheric entry through parachute, retrorocket burn and a final hovering hazard scan, had already succeeded or failed before anyone on Earth could know. Nine minutes after entry, the landing legs of China's first Mars lander settled into the dust of southern Utopia Planitia.

No nation had ever attempted what China was attempting. The United States and Soviet Union built up to Mars landings across decades of separate orbiters and landers; Tianwen-1, launched on a Long March 5 from Wenchang on 23 July 2020, carried an orbiter, a lander and a rover on China's very first independent try. After entering Mars orbit in February 2021, the spacecraft spent three patient months photographing the landing zone before committing. On 22 May the 240-kilogram, solar-powered Zhurong rover, named for an ancient god of fire, rolled down its ramps onto the rust-coloured plain.

Zhurong was designed for ninety Martian days. It worked for 358, driving 1,921 metres south toward what some scientists interpret as the shoreline of an ancient northern ocean, and returning data that pointed to surprisingly recent water activity in Utopia Planitia. It even dropped a small wireless camera onto the soil, backed away, and posed beside its landing platform for a group portrait. In May 2022, with winter closing in and dust storms rising, the rover put itself to sleep. It was due to wake in December. It never did; dust on its solar panels had sealed its fate.