China has become only the second nation to successfully land a spacecraft on Mars on Friday, joining the United States. Tianwen-1, China’s first mission to the Red Planet, launched in the middle of last year, sharing the particularly busy July 2020 Martian launch window with NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, including the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, and the United Arab Emirates’ Al Amal orbiter.
Tianwen-1’s orbiter section successfully separated from it’s lander section, which then successfully landed on Mars’ Utopia Planitia, carrying with it a small rover called Zhurong. Landing occurred at 23:11 UTC.