Mars Is Getting Crowded
Perseverance, Ingenuity, and China's new Zhurong rover are all active on Mars at once, with UAE's Hope watching from orbit.
Mars has never had this much company on its surface at the same time. NASA’s Perseverance rover has been trundling around Jezero Crater since it landed back in February, with its little helicopter sidekick Ingenuity buzzing around nearby doing test flights nobody was totally sure would work. And now China’s Zhurong rover has rolled off its landing platform too, deployed onto the Martian surface just this past week. Add in the UAE’s Hope orbiter, which has been circling the planet studying its atmosphere, and you’ve got a genuinely busy stretch of simultaneous Mars exploration.
It’s worth sitting with that for a second. For most of the history of Mars exploration, “active mission” meant one probe, maybe two, doing their own thing with years between major arrivals. Now we’ve got three countries effectively running parallel science operations on the same planet at the same time. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a function of the 2020 launch window, when Mars and Earth lined up favorably and basically everyone with the hardware ready decided to go. Perseverance, Zhurong (via the Tianwen-1 mission), and Hope all launched within about two weeks of each other last summer, and now they’re all arriving and getting to work within months of one another.
Why this matters beyond the novelty
Having multiple independent missions operating concurrently is good for the field in ways that go beyond “cool, more robots.” Different agencies bring different instruments, different landing sites, and different research priorities. Perseverance is hunting for biosignatures and caching samples for an eventual return mission. Zhurong is going to be characterizing soil and subsurface structure in Utopia Planitia, a totally different region of the planet. Hope is doing atmospheric and weather monitoring from orbit, essentially giving Mars its first dedicated weather satellite. Stack that together and you get a much richer, more complete picture of the planet than any single mission could produce on its own.
There’s also just something notable about China now operating a rover on Mars at all. The US has landed rovers there for decades, but Zhurong makes China only the second country to successfully put a rover on the Martian surface and drive it around. That’s a real technical achievement, regardless of how you feel about the broader geopolitics of space exploration right now.
I’ll be curious to see how long all three keep running simultaneously. Ingenuity in particular was only ever meant to fly a handful of demonstration flights, and it’s already well past that, so every additional flight at this point feels a bit like bonus content. Rovers tend to outlive their design lifetimes too — Perseverance’s predecessor Curiosity is still going strong years past its original mission window. If Zhurong and Perseverance both stick around for a while, and Hope keeps returning atmospheric data, we could be looking at a multi-year stretch where Mars simply has more active hardware on and around it than at any point before. For a planet we’ve been visiting on and off since the 1970s, that’s a pretty remarkable milestone to hit in 2021.