China's Mars rover assigned extended mission after exceeding life expectancy China's National Space Administration has announced that the Zhurong Mars rover has ticked off everything on its to-do list, and is still ticking over, so has been assigned an extended mission. Zhurong left Earth in June 2020 atop a Long March V rocket, and on May 15th 2021 landed on Mars. That feat made China the third nation …
Who are those who generally hold China to have been second to the USA in the rover-landing caper.
Looking at the dates I would say that's rather silly.
It was the first successful landing on Mars after all. (Mars 2 was the first, (if not the last) unsuccessful landing on Mars).
Mars 3, Prop-M rover, landed successfully on December 2, 1971. 4.5 kilograms (9.9 lb) rover tethered to the Mars 3 lander. Lost when the Mars 3 lander stopped communicating about 14.5 seconds after landing.[18] The loss of communication may have been due to the extremely powerful Martian dust storm taking place at the time or an issue with the Mars 3 orbiter's ability to relay communications.
So who will be next then.
Planned
The European-Russian ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin is planned to launch in 2022.
Proposed
The JAXA Melos rover was supposed to be launched in 2022. JAXA has not given an update since 2015.
NASA Mars Geyser Hopper
It's funny how objects made for space exploration regularly exceed life expectancy (as long as they survive the landing process), whereas objects made for Earth consumption regularly fail to live their life expectancy without issues.
Just sayin'
If you buy something hand made as a one off (or two off, since they usually keep a twin at home to test things on if necessary) costing hundreds of millions of dollars, it will last a long time.
It pays to be conservative about your life expectancy goals for things going to space, since a lot of bad things can happen to them. You don't want to say "this rover should last 20 years" and then get a black eye when it fails after "only" 10.
Not really that simple....
Many missions are budgeted for a specific period - however - engineers often 'sneak in' contingency (if it doesnt cost too much) in the designs.... Especially true for fuel carried, battery capacity and such. Think about the Russian module that was docked with the ISS last month. It carried a lot of extra thruster fuel for its mission profile - and that why it could get to the iss at all.... Nevermind the extra jolt the main engine later gave the ISS....
Between China kicking off its space program in the 1990s and SpaceX beginning its first development a number of years later, we're now well and truly into a new phase of space exploration. Gone is the artisan, easy-does-it approach, instead we get the breakneck pace again that defined the 1950s and 1960s with the Space Race.
This is further hammered home by the dozens of larger startups in this space, many of whom are leisurely zipping past the old giants like Boeing. In this regard China's space program is rathe rlike those startups, only backed by the financial might of the entire Chinese state.
Makes a Chinese Moon base by the 2030s seem eminently realistic.
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