China’s Zhuzhong navigator has been stable for months. In this respect reported Moon and Planets Laboratory, University of Arizona.
In 2020, China launched the Tianwen-1 mission to Mars and entered the planet’s orbit on February 10, 2021. In addition to the orbiter, it included the Zhuzhong rover, which made a soft landing and then transmitted several frames. In May 2022, with the arrival of winter in the northern hemisphere and no longer enough solar power and heat for the rover to operate, the device went into sleep mode as planned. The wake was supposed to occur during the spring equinox in December, but there has been no news from the device since. Zhuzhong was hardly mentioned in reports published by Chinese state media on the second anniversary of the mission’s launch on February 10.
Now the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory has released images taken by the HiRISE camera of the American MRO orbiter. The pictures in this collage were taken on March 11, 2022, September 8, 2022 and February 7, 2023. The rover looks like a bluish object at 5 o’clock from the round crater. It seems that the device didn’t start moving in December and has been dormant since at least 8 September. At the same time, the South China Morning Post reported Citing anonymous sources, he stated that engineers were unable to receive a signal from the rover in early January.
One possible cause of the problem could be accumulated dust, which both complicates the operation of solar panels and blocks chemical heaters, which store heat during the day and release it at night.