China has safely sent an unmanned lander to Mars, becoming the second country to have visited the red planet after United States.
The state news agency for China confirmed that a rover safely landed on a large plain on Mars early Saturday morning (approximately 7:18 PM ET/4:18 PT Friday).
The rover, named Zhurong after the Chinese god of fire, is part of China’s Tianwen-1 mission, which launched in July 2020.
China had in February, announced that it was orbiting Mars before this landmark.
Also, next month, the country’s space program plans to send three astronauts back to space. That follows the collection of moon rocks and the launch of a key space statin component late last year.
A state newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, in its reaction, said that the mission had “spectacularly conquered a new major milestone” with its landing.
The landing raises the stakes for the United States space program, which has had Mars and the moon practically to itself. But Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, was magnamous, on Twitter. “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 wrote on Twitter.
