China’s Mars rover won’t come out of hibernation

What happened to China’s Zhurong Mars rover? Many planetary scientists and space experts wonder this. The device should have come out of hibernation weeks ago, but so far the rover shows no signs of life. The Chinese space agency, meanwhile, remains silent on the status of the Mars rover.

Zhurong landed on the Red Planet in May 2021 as part of China’s Tianwen-1 mission, the country’s first interplanetary mission to include a Mars satellite. The rover spent a year researching before winter set in on Mars and the rover went into hibernation mode due to low temperatures. If it is too cold, the robot cannot properly recharge its batteries.

The rover was supposed to wake up last December, at the dawn of spring on Mars, but the first reports surfaced in early January that flight control was still waiting for an initial signal. Now that things are still calm, fears are growing that Zhurong will not be heard from at all.

That wouldn’t be surprising, says astrobiologist David Flannery, involved with NASA’s Perseverance rover, on the website of Nature. “There’s a long history of solar landers and rovers on Mars that ran out of power.” Last month, NASA announced that it had to say goodbye to the InSight lander, which could no longer generate enough energy after a dust storm: the solar panels were covered in Martian sand.

The latter could also be the case with Zhurong. If there is too much dust on the solar panels, it will not be possible to recharge the batteries. The rover has a mechanism to shake off dust, but it only works when the car is active.

Some remain optimistic. In the coming months, when it gets warmer, Zhurong may still be able to sufficiently recharge his batteries and wake up from sleep mode. For this, it must be at least -15 degrees Celsius and the batteries must be able to generate at least 140 watts. According to measurements by the American rover Perseverance, which travels more than 1,500 kilometers, the temperature is now slightly higher.

In addition to Zhurong’s radio silence, Chinese flight control recently lost contact with the satellite orbiting Mars. Although both spacecraft have yet to be written off, they completed their primary mission last year. This makes the mission for China a great success anyway.