China Zhurong Rover is Still Asleep, NASA Confirms with Mars HiRISE Team

Isaiah Richard, Tech Times 21 February 2023, 07:02 pm

There are growing questions regarding the Zhurong rover on Mars, a space vehicle that is meant to survey the planet under the Chinese space agency, and their take on studying the planet. It is still asleep, as per NASA's look into it, and it has been like this since last year after it encountered a dreadful dust storm that led to its hibernation.

The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) has not yet revealed anything regarding Zhurong's fate, should it still wake up or end its mission on the neighboring planet.

China's Zhurong Mars Rover is Still Asleep says NASA

(Photo : NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)
China's Zhurong rover is the blue dot on the surface.

Through the University of Arizona's HiRISE team, NASA has identified that the Zhurong Mars rover is still in the same spot as it was in the past, centering on a deep hibernation for a long time. The surveying vessel of the company took images of the Zhurong and shared them with the public, seeing that there were no activities from the rover.

It is almost a year since the Zhurong went into its sleeping mode, focusing on recuperating from its ghastly experience with a dust storm back in May last year.

The team is surveying the region where Zhurong landed and the general area of the Utopia Plantitia region of Mars.

NASA HiRISE Team Snaps Photos of Zhurong

HiRISE said that it regularly takes images of different regions on Mars to send back to the planet for further studies, and coming across the Zhurong rover shows its inactivity for the past months.

The team said that the Chinese rover on Mars did not change position from September 2022 until the present, with growing concerns in the space community about this happening.

It is unknown if the Zhurong will still resume operations, as there has yet to be any information from the Chinese space agency.

Will the Zhurong Rover still Wake Up?

China's Zhurong Rover surprised the world and the entire space industry as it is one unanticipated venture from the East Asian superpower's progression toward the cosmos. It is the third country to land on Mars, centering on bringing over a rover to explore the Red Planet and center on research to help more on its knowledge of it.

After different missions and exploration activities of the rover, it sent multiple images of its findings and data to its Chinese team, with a future sample return mission also in place.

However, in May 2022, as it was preparing for the infamous Mars winter, which brought extreme cold weather on the planet, the rover encountered an unforgiving dust storm.

The Zhurong went into hibernation earlier than expected, and being that it was a dust storm, there would be less solar power to collect, so it also went into power saving.

Now, NASA sees Zhurong again with the HiRise, which still accounts for its hibernation, remaining in the same spot for a long time now, with different speculations that it may not operate again.