- China’s Zhurong Mars rover was put into hibernation over a year ago
- He was supposed to be woken up in December but the operation never allowed him to reconnect with the robot.
- China has finally formalized the loss of the vehicle
The conquest of space is not always all about success. China has just officially acknowledged the loss of its Zhurong rover on Mars. The rover, the first of its kind for the country, had been put into hibernation last year to survive the winter on the red planet. A season marked by dust storms that threaten to obscure the vehicle’s solar panels, its main source of energy.
And, alas, that is precisely what got the better of the robot. According to the Chinese space agency: “we have been without communication with the rover since it went into hibernation”, explains the CNSA agency in an official press release. And to add that a pile of dust probably blocked the light necessary for the solar panels to charge the batteries of the robot-explorer via sunlight.
China formalizes the loss of its first Mars rover
A common problem for this kind of missions and which regularly leads other missions to their final end. Last year NASA lost contact with the Insight lander for similar reasons. China, however, took its time before confirming this. The first signs that the Chinese mission was in peril began to leak around January.
NASA had then managed to find the rover and had taken some images via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter confirming that the robot had since remained motionless. The Chinese space agency rarely formalizes its failures when they occur. The communist country often prefers to wait for the most opportune moment for her. After all, space technologies are the most advanced – and overlap with the military domain.
De facto the problem of dust on the solar panels of anything sent to the surface of Mars has been known for a long time. And that is even why NASA has opted for a few missions for different energy sources on this distant world. The Curiosity rover, still in operation, for example, carries an RTG.
It is a thermoelectric generator based on a radioisotope. In other words, a small nuclear reactor (or rather battery). This one, developed by Rocketdyne and Teledyne Energy Systems is designed to produce 110 Watts of electrical power and 2000 Watts of thermal power at the start of the mission.
This kind of nuclear battery thus produces an average of 2.5 kWh of energy each day, which is much more than the solar panels that fitted the first missions. The whole works thanks to some 4.8 kg of plutonium dioxide.
