China's first Mars rover named 'Zhurong'
The Hindu
Tianwen-1's goals include analysing and mapping the Martian surface and geology, looking for water ice and studying the climate and surface environment.
China’s first Mars rover will be named Zhurong after a traditional fire god, the government announced Saturday. The rover is aboard the Tianwen-1 probe that arrived in Mars orbit on February 24 and is due to land in May to look for evidence of life. It is part of Chinese space plans that include launching a crewed orbital station and landing a human on the moon. China in 2019 became the first country to land a space probe on the little-explored far side of the moon and in December returned lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s.![](/newspic/picid-1269750-20250212004700.jpg)
In a study published in the journal Mammalian Biology on December 23, 2024, researchers compared the calls of Asian elephants based on their age, sex, and behaviour. They found the duration of trumpets remained fairly consistent across all age classes for both male and female Asian elephants but roars and roar-rumbles got longer with age.
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The STS-63 mission, more popularly dubbed as the near-Mir mission, was a successful mission that spanned from February 3-11, 1995. A mission that served as a dress rehearsal for later missions that would rendezvous and dock with Mir, STS-63 reeled off a number of firsts. A.S.Ganesh tries and lists them out for you…