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Zhurong completes 100 days on Mars

Zhurong's loaction, August 31, 2021

The new colonial movement: In announcing today that its Mars rover Zhurong has completed 100 days on the Martian surface, the state-run Chinese press released one very low-resolution panorama taken at the rover’s new position, and a map showing its full route since landing.

The map to the right, created by placing that route on a high resolution Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image, shows us where Zhurong presently sits as well as where it might travel next. It still appears that they are attempting to reach the heat shield used during landing, which also suggests that they are giving high priority to the engineering aspects of this mission, possibly ranking that component higher than any science they get.

If high resolution versions of that panorama are available, they are probably only available on the Chinese language sites, which makes it very difficult for a non-Chinese-speaker to find.

According to the release, the rover has now traveled just under 3,500 feet, which means it is maintaining a pace greater than 1,000 feet per month. The release also noted this fact about the rover’s upcoming travels, as well as the Tianwen-1 orbiter being used as a communications relay satellite:

The probes will experience a sun outage in mid-to-late September when the Sun is aligned with Earth and Mars, with the solar radiation interfering with the communication between the probes and ground stations. The orbiter and rover will stop working until the sun outage comes to an end.

This conjunction occurs every two years. It means there will also be a pause in data from the American rovers and orbiters. When the last conjunction occurred in September 2019, the communications shutdown lasted about two weeks.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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