Scientist Says China’s Mars Rover Could Remain Dormant

A Long March-5 rocket—carrying an orbiter, lander, and rover as part of the Tianwen-1 mission to Mars—lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Center in southern China's Hainan Province on July 23, 2020. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

China’s first interplanetary rover, Zhurong, will likely stay dormant on Mars, a Chinese scientist said on state media CCTV on April 25.

Zhang Rongqiao, the chief scientist of China’s Mars mission, said that Zhurong has not moved due to a lack of solar power caused by a pile-up of sand and dust since it went into “hibernation” in May 2022.

The Zhurong rover was expected to reactivate last December when Mars went into spring equinox.

The Dormant Rover

In May 2022, the Chinese rover entered a planned hibernation state to get through the low solar radiation levels of winter in Mars’ Utopia Planitia region, where the spacecraft landed.

Boulder-size blocks of water ice around the rim of an impact crater on Mars, as viewed by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE camera) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, in this image made available by NASA on Oct. 27, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona via AP

According to images of the rover taken last year on March 11 and Sept. 8 and on Feb. 7 this year, the rover has not changed its position since September 2022, according to a Feb. 21 report by the HiRISE Operations Center. The images were captured by a camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

On Tuesday, Zhang, the chief engineer of the Tianwen-1 mission, explained on CCTV that dust and sand accumulation could have caused the rover to enter a dormant mode.

“A 20 percent dust coverage will lead to the power generation issue of the rover, 30 percent would require the strongest lighting conditions to reawaken [the rover], while 40 percent means the rover is over, never waking up,” he said.

The 240-kilogram Zhurong rover touched down on the southern Utopia Planitia on May 14, 2021.

Tianwen-1 was one of three missions that arrived on Mars in February 2021, along with the U.S. Perseverance rover and the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Hope orbiter.

NASA’s nuclear-powered Perseverance landed on the red planet on Feb. 18, 2021. The mission has been active ever since, seeking signs of ancient life and collecting samples of rock and soil for possible future research.

The UAE’s Hope landed on Mars on Feb. 9, 2021. In February this year, the spacecraft moved to a new orbit around Mars to study one of the planet’s tiny moons, Deimos.

Zhang Ting contributed to this report.