China Successfully Lands on Mars, Preps Rover for Deployment

by Joel Hruska

Image by China National Space Administration/CC BY-SA 4.0

China became the third nation to successfully land on Mars over the weekend when the Tianwen-1 lander separated and successfully de-orbited. Only the United States and the Soviet Union have previously landed functional landers on Mars; several probes intended for the Red Planet have suffered what we might call “inadvertent lithobraking.”