China on Mars: Zhurong rover returns first pictures
Another pic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;Vct0PXV" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;Vct0PXV</a><p>It&#x27;s an interesting design, in someways the ramp is a deceptively simple concept but I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s safer than the US approach.<p>Some other neat things are:<p>Solar panels, they are a specially designed to electrically repel Martian dust, in theory there should be a decent power gain from this and it will likely be used in future missions. While other rovers fortuitously found solar was self cleaning on Mars, power is still a knife-edge engineering problem for rovers.<p>Ground penetrating radar, can see down 100m, a lot further than anyone else has ever investigated, should yield some interesting data. Like most other missions they are very interested in prior and current water on the planet.<p>Coverage, they are planning a few hundred metres over 3 months, the rover itself can do 200m in a day though if needed, very unlikely that will happen but it is in a flat area of Mars. The landing zone was so huge that there&#x27;ll be some tough choices about what is the most productive area to explore for planetary science.<p>The speed of entry, Zhurong came in at about half the speed of Perseverance, this makes life a lot easier. It takes a lot longer to bleed off that velocity in orbit but seems like other nations attempting a landing will follow this path.<p>I&#x27;d be interested to know about their uplink, remember hearing they might be using an ESA orbiter but not sure about that, the orbiter they have is not that great for a connection due to it&#x27;s altitude.<p>Technical info is surprisingly hard to find, even in publications like nature or science mags normally focused more on the details.