Thread by @tanyaofmars

China's Zhurong rover released its first images from the surface of Mars! It touched down in Utopia Planitia, in the northern plains of Mars.

Let's take a little tour of Utopia Planitia today. (Thread: 1/n)

If Utopia sounds familiar, it's probably because (A) you're a #StarTrek fan, or (B) you remember that Viking 2 landed in Utopia back in the 1970s—but it's much farther north than Zhurong.

(2/n)

Utopia Planitia, like a lot of Mars' northern plains, is pretty broad and flat at the large scale, which makes it an excellent landing site from an engineering safety standpoint.

Zhurong's area of Utopia is *much* less boulder-strewn than Viking 2's though!

(3/n)

Now if we revisit that landing sites map from the first tweet, you'll notice there's a huge bias in where we've landed on Mars before. That's b/c the northern hemisphere is much lower elevation than the south—which means more atmosphere to help slow you down during landing! (4/n)

So Utopia's flat and safe...but that doesn't mean it's boring! Most of what makes it exciting is merely hidden underground...there's ice in them thar scarps!

(These scarps are farther north in Utopia than Zhurong.) (5/n)

There's a buried ice deposit in Utopia Planitia the volume of Lake Superior—discovered by @corginaut using SHARAD radar data when she was an undergrad at @westernuSpace! 🇨🇦

planetary.org/articles/1122-…

In southern Utopia where Zhurong is however, we see mostly smooth plains dotted with craters and dusted with little dunes and ripples here and there from the wind. (7/n)

Zhurong is equipped w/ a ground penetrating radar instrument, so it might be able to tell us if there's ice more deeply buried here than in northern Utopia. It'll reveal some subsurface info.

The two rods sticking out on either side here are part of the radar instrument. (8/n)