Tianwen-1 & Zhurong

Tianwen-1 marked China's dramatic entrance into Mars exploration, accomplishing in a single mission what most space programs had approached in careful stages. Launched by the China National Space Administration in July 2020, the mission combined an orbiter, a lander, and a rover — an ambitious all-in-one approach. It arrived at Mars in February 2021 and, a few months later, successfully placed its rover on the surface.

That rover, named Zhurong after a fire god in Chinese mythology, touched down in May 2021 on a vast northern plain. With its landing, China became only the second nation to deploy and operate a rover on Mars for a meaningful duration, a milestone that had taken other space programs decades to reach. Zhurong carried cameras and ground-penetrating radar, and it rolled across the surface studying the terrain, soil, and subsurface structure of its landing region.

The orbiter, meanwhile, mapped the planet from above and served as a communications relay for the rover, while also conducting its own survey of the Martian surface and atmosphere. Tianwen-1 — the name comes from a classical Chinese poem and means "Questions to Heaven" — demonstrated a level of technical capability that firmly established China as a major force in planetary exploration, joining the United States among the nations to have operated successfully on the Martian surface.