3 May. (EUROPE PRESS) –
Engineers responsible for China’s Zhurong rover on Mars remain confident of re-establishing communication, as the year approaches when the rover went into hibernation due to a dust storm.
The rover has been immobile since May 20, 2022. It was expected to wake up in late December, but has yet to show any signs of activity. Last week, the rover’s chief designer, Zhang Rongqiao, gave an update on the rover’s status.
“We haven’t had any communication from the rover since it went into hibernation,” Zhang said, quoted by Universe Today. “We are monitoring it every day and we believe that it has not woken up because the sunlight has not yet reached the minimum level for power generation.”
The culprit is probably the dust on the solar panels. Dust buildup killed NASA’s Opportunity rover in 2018 and, more recently, forced a premature end to the InSight lander’s data collection mission in 2022. It may have spelled the end for Zhurong, too.
“Based on our analysis,” Zhang said, “the most likely possibility is that an unpredictable accumulation of Martian dust has caused a decline in power generation capacity, which is insufficient to wake it up.”
Of course, this certainly doesn’t spell the end of the rover’s mission. The changing seasons on the red planet are expected to intensify the sun’s rays at Zhurong’s location in the near future. A benevolent dust eddy could also clean the solar panels. Any of these could bring power levels back to operating standards.
If the dust overaccumulation is 30 percent higher than engineers had planned, Zhurong could survive, causing him to wake up once the seasons change. However, a 40 percent overaccumulation would mean it’s unlikely to wake up ever again.
Zhurong has already spent 358 active days on Mars, far exceeding his 90-day primary mission. She traveled just under 2,000 meters through Utopia Planetia, a large impact basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Zhurong used ground penetrating radar to collect data and discovered evidence that the region was once the site of an ancient ocean. The other instruments on it collected weather data, including surface pressure and wind speed. The rover also found evidence of “recent” water, recent in this case, meaning 400,000 years ago.
Zhurong arrived on Mars along with an orbiter, Tianwen-1, which is still in operation and collects data from orbiting the Martian surface.
