China’s Mars Rover began exploring the surface earlier on Saturday, making China only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet. It was in July 2020 Tianwen-1 Mars probe, which carried the Zhurong rover, was launched, AFP reports.  

Tianwen-1, a week ago, landed on a vast northern lava plain called the Utopia Planitia and captured its first photos of the surface a few days later.  The Mars probe and the Zhurong rover are expected to spend around three months,  collecting geographical data, clicking photos, and analysing and collecting rock samples, AFP reports.

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The six-wheeled, solar-powered, 240-kilogram (530-pound) Zhurong is named after a Chinese mythical fire god. China has now sent astronauts into space, powered probes to the Moon and landed a rover on Mars, the most prestigious of all prizes in the competition for dominion of space.

The United States and Russia are the only other countries to have reached Mars, and only the former has operated a rover on the surface.

Several US, Russian and European attempts to land rovers on Mars have failed in the past, most recently in 2016 with the crash-landing of the Schiaparelli joint Russian-European spacecraft.

The latest successful arrival came in February, when US space agency NASA landed its rover Perseverance, which has since been exploring the planet.

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China has come a long way in its race to catch up with the United States and Russia, whose astronauts and cosmonauts have decades of experience in space exploration.

It successfully launched the first module of its new space station last month with hopes of having it crewed by 2022 and eventually sending humans to the Moon.