In 2021, China becomes the third country to safely land a rover on Mars – SCMP archive

On this day five years ago, China became the third country in the world to safely land a rover on Mars after months of space travel

3-MIN READ3-MIN ListenSCMPPublished: 2:15pm, 15 May 2026Beijing joins Mars club after ‘nine minutes of ter­ror’By William Zheng

This article was first published on May 16, 2021

After seven months of space travel, three months in orbit and “nine minutes of ter­ror”, China has become the third coun­try in the world to safely land a rover on Mars.

The China National Space Admin­is­tra­tion (CNSA) said its rover Zhu Rong – named after the Chinese god of fire and war – suc­cess­fully landed on Mars yes­ter­day after “nine minutes of ter­ror”, refer­ring to Nasa’s descrip­tion of the period of des­cent, when engin­eers on Earth have no con­trol or over­sight of the rover because of the radio sig­nal delay.

“The sci­entific research team con­firmed via the tele­metry sig­nal sent by the Zhu Rong Mars rover that on May 15, the Tian­wen-1 Lander suc­cess­fully landed in the preselec­ted land­ing area in the Uto­pia Plain of south­ern Mars,” CNSA said.

Pres­id­ent Xi Jin­ping said in a writ­ten con­grat­u­lat­ory mes­sage that the mis­sion was an import­ant step in China’s space explor­a­tion.

Sci­ent­ists should con­tinue their explor­a­tion of Mars and accel­er­ate China’s devel­op­ment as a space power.