{"id":4381,"date":"2021-12-16T14:54:11","date_gmt":"2021-12-16T14:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/zhang-rongqiao-mars-explorer\/"},"modified":"2021-12-16T14:54:11","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T14:54:11","slug":"zhang-rongqiao-mars-explorer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/zhang-rongqiao-mars-explorer\/","title":{"rendered":"Zhang Rongqiao: Mars explorer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/font><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000This engineer leads China\u2019s first successful Mars mission, which reached the planet this year and landed a rover on its surface.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000By Smriti Mallapaty<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000On 15 May, Zhang Rongqiao wiped tears from his eyes as China\u2019s Mars rover landed safely on the planet\u2019s sandy, auburn plains. \u201cI was so overwhelmed,\u201d says Zhang, who coordinated the mission.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000The touchdown marked the conclusion of a 475-million-kilometre journey full of peril for Zhang and the China National Space Administration, which had never before sent a successful mission to Mars.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000The landing, says Zhang, gave him a taste of the old Chinese saying \u2014 it takes ten years to sharpen a good sword. China is only the second nation, after the United States, to place a rover on Mars, which is notorious for crushing the hopes of space agencies; nearly half of all missions to the planet have ended in failure.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000China\u2019s team faced many unknowns in what Zhang calls \u201csuch a strange and complex environment\u201d. As chief designer, he is responsible for coordinating a team of tens of thousands who built and operate the Mars mission, named Tianwen-1. The project consists of an orbiter, a lander and the rover, called Zhurong. \u201cThe buck stops with him,\u201d says David Flannery, an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000The mission was one of three to arrive at Mars in 2021 \u2014 the others were NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover and an orbiter delivered by the United Arab Emirates. The success of China\u2019s mission has made a national hero<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000of Zhang, who has appeared numerous times on state media, but rarely talks to<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000the press outside China. He responded toNature\u2019s questions by e-mail.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000Science took a back seat to Tianwen-1\u2019s primary goal, which was to develop and demonstrate China\u2019s prowess in deep-space missions that travel beyond the Moon. But Zhang says that getting rich and high- quality information from Mars was a key consideration of the design. And researchers say that the data generated by the rover\u2019s six scientific instruments, and another seven on the orbiter, will contribute to a better understanding of a previously unexplored patch of the planet.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000Born in 1966 in the town of Anling, eastern China, Zhang studied engineering at Xidian University in Xi\u2019an. He later completed a master\u2019s degree at the Chinese Academy of Space Technology in Beijing, and has worked on Earth-observation satellites.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000Lu Pan, a planetary scientist at the University of Copenhagen, says that Zhang probably played a key part in the CNSA\u2019s decision to send an orbiter, lander and rover to Mars in one shipment \u2014 making China the first country to do so. Researchers also say that Zhang considered their input on the choice of instruments and landing site, which will help to ensure that the mission generates as much research as possible.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000\u201cHe encouraged scientists to participate in the mission to get more scientific output,\u201d says Wenzhe Fa, a planetary scientist at Peking University, Beijing, who is analysing radar data from the Mars mission.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000Launched on 23 July 2020, Tianwen-1 arrived at the red planet in February, and dropped the lander and rover in May. The spacecraft settled on a vast impact crater named Utopia Planitia \u2014 selected mainly because it is flat and a relatively safe place to land. Since then, the rover has travelled more than 1,200 metres south, taking panoramic images as well as selfies that have been widely shared online.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000In mid-September, Zhurong went into hibernation because the Sun got in the way of communications between Mars and the Earth, but it returned to work in late October. It is now heading towards a region that might once have been the coastline of an ancient ocean, where researchers will search for clues about the evolution of Mars.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000The mission has produced limited science so far, but data collected by some instruments on the rover and orbiter have been shared with more than two dozen teams across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, says Fa, and results are seeping out. They expect to learn insights about the geology of the Utopia Planitia region and the fate of water on the planet.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000For China\u2019s deep-space missions to take a big leap scientifically, the country will need to refocus towards advancing research rather than chiefly demonstrating engineering. That switch has already happened with China\u2019s lunar missions, says Pan. \u201cThese processes take time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000The real research riches for China, says Flannery, will come later \u2014 with the next round of planetary missions. China plans to launch sample-return missions to the asteroid Kamo?oalewa in 2024, and to Mars before 2030. And it has its sights set on Jupiter, too.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000Tianwen-1 has also given China\u2019s nascent field of planetary science a boost, say researchers.<\/p>\n

\u3000\u3000\u201cA new generation of scientists is being created right now with this mission,\u201d says Flannery.<\/p>\n

articles\/d41586-021-03621-0<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u3000\u3000This engineer leads China\u2019s first successful Mars mission, which reached the planet this year and landed a rover on its surface. \u3000\u3000By Smriti Mallapaty \u3000\u3000On 15 May, Zhang Rongqiao wiped tears from his eyes as China\u2019s Mars rover landed safely on the planet\u2019s sandy, auburn plains. \u201cI was so overwhelmed,\u201d says Zhang, who coordinated the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}