China's Zhurong rover may be dead: NASA images show no sign of life China National Space Administration's Zhurong rover remains uncertain as the latest images captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released on Tuesday show the vehicle hasn't moved in months. Under China's first interplanetary mission, Tianwen-1, Zhurong was launched in July 2020 and landed on Mars in May 2021. Zhurong …
All we see now is the shell left on the surface to collect solar power, the rest is tunnelling its way towards the American probes. We've seen the documentary:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061387/ Battle Beneath The Earth
All NASA's fault: they started the Robots With Lasers On Mars race.
What, Winnie the Pooh would lose face when their precious probe went through something every other one eventually succumbs to? Where scientists and engineers from every other nation that managed the feat would pat them on the shoulder, go "well done, good run, we've all been there, maybe XKCD will pick it up". China is starting to make North Korea look chatty.
It's pretty much the same over here; management talk about successes but don't release bad news. Or on the rare occasion that they do it'll be done in small print 900 pages into a document so boring than even an AI would give up reading it, released on a day when everybody else is paying attention to a large news story.
Maybe the rover got trampled; there seems to be a giant footprint in the sand, in the upper-left side of the image. Whoever made those footprints probably tried to cover their tracks to avoid liability for damage to property. They probably don't have insurance.
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