Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona
Until recently, the only nations to have landed something on Mars were the U.S. and Russia. Of them, the U.S. is the one that managed to keep hardware going over there for long stretches of time, and the nation was, for a long time, the sole operator of working rovers on the Red Planet. That’s until China decided to have a go at it.
Back in May of last year, the Tianwen-1 mission was declared a success, after the Zhurong rover was deployed on the surface of the planet. It landed somewhere in Utopia Planitia and started going about its business, getting over 940 gigabytes of data to date.
For the record, Utopia Planitia, now a large plain over on Mars, is considered the Solar System’s largest impact basin, being a 3,300 km (2,50 miles) in diameter reminder of something positively huge hitting Mars a long time ago. And with things of this scale, finding interesting details to talk about is no easy task.
Luckily, humanity has in orbit around the Red Planet an orbital camera. Called HiRISE, it’s responsible for tens of thousands of detailed shots of Mars we now are capable of studying. The one we have here, captured in January 2022 from an altitude of 286 km (178 miles), shows the area just south of the Zhurong landing site.
The defining trait of this area is the scarp running west to east, like some sort of miniature Chinese Great Wall placed on Mars to help the Chinese rover not get homesick.
Now, a scarp is generally a kind of natural wall, that can form through a variety of processes. Scientists are unsure what caused this one to form, and they’re debating on whether a flow of wet sediments, or a collapse, is responsible for giving birth to it.
People over at NASA and the University of Arizona, who run the HiRISE, are hopeful Zhurong will eventually reach its Martian Great Wall, and have a closer look at it.
For the record, Utopia Planitia, now a large plain over on Mars, is considered the Solar System’s largest impact basin, being a 3,300 km (2,50 miles) in diameter reminder of something positively huge hitting Mars a long time ago. And with things of this scale, finding interesting details to talk about is no easy task.
Luckily, humanity has in orbit around the Red Planet an orbital camera. Called HiRISE, it’s responsible for tens of thousands of detailed shots of Mars we now are capable of studying. The one we have here, captured in January 2022 from an altitude of 286 km (178 miles), shows the area just south of the Zhurong landing site.
The defining trait of this area is the scarp running west to east, like some sort of miniature Chinese Great Wall placed on Mars to help the Chinese rover not get homesick.
Now, a scarp is generally a kind of natural wall, that can form through a variety of processes. Scientists are unsure what caused this one to form, and they’re debating on whether a flow of wet sediments, or a collapse, is responsible for giving birth to it.
People over at NASA and the University of Arizona, who run the HiRISE, are hopeful Zhurong will eventually reach its Martian Great Wall, and have a closer look at it.
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