Chinese Mars Rover Zhurong will be operational by this weekend 

As part of China's Tianwen-1 mission, the rover touched down Friday May 14 on the  Martian plain Utopia Planitia. Zhurong has remained inside its landing platform since landing in Mars

Zhurong will spend its first week on its platform studying its surroundings and performing checks on its systems and instruments according to China Xinhua news agency. If all systems checks are good, the rover will start to go down its double ramps and finally and officially touch down on the Mars surface.

Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter that accompanied the rover to Mars has been circling the Red Planet every 48 hours when it first arrived last month. To support the rover in transmitting information to back China, it recently moved itself into a much lower orbit with an 8.2-hour period.

European Space Agency to partner with start-up to clean up space debris from 2025.

Low Earth orbit has been increasingly trafficked by space debris since humans have explored space. Debris consists of items such as inactive satellites, upper stages of launch vehicles and other materials. These move at tens of thousands of miles per hour as it orbits earth and could damage active satellites and spacecraft in their launch.

A start-up named Clearspace and The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced plans to launch an orbiter that can clean up space debris in the near future. The orbiter’s first mission is to collect a Vega Secondary Payload Adapter (Vespa) left behind by ESA's Vega launcher in 2013 using it experimental four arm robot.

ESA has signed a $100+ million contract with ClearSpace to complete this mission. The team will use its ClearSpace-1 robot to collect Vespa from low Earth orbit and drag it down back to the atmosphere for both spacecraft to be burned out and destroyed.

Vespa is a reasonable first target for ClearSpace-1 given it is a relatively simple shape, sturdy construction, and about the size of a small satellite. If all goes according to plan, the team can leverage the same technology to capture larger, more challenging pieces of space debris in future missions. The team plans to first test ClearSpace-1 in a lower orbit of about 310 miles (500 km), prior to launching the mission to capture Vespa in 2025.

China unveils Zhurong rover’s first images of Mars

China has released the first photos of Mars taken by its Zhurong rover. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has released two images (one colour and one black & white) from the rover. The photos show the rover itself, the platform and the martian surface that it will soon traverse on.

The CNSA also released two short videos that came from the videos of the orbiter and Zhurong rover's landing capsule separating during its descent down to Mars.

The six-wheeled, 530-lb. (240 kilogram) Zhurong rover carries six instruments that the rover will use to study geology and climate in the Utopia Planitia region. The rover is meant to operate for about three months. 

Zhurong's next milestone is expected to occur on Friday or Saturday (May 21 or May 22), when the rover will make its way down the pair of ramps seen in the new greyscale image to reach the Martian surface proper.

China's Zhurong Traverses the Mars surface for the first time

China's first rover, the Zhurong, rolled onto the Red Planet's surface late Friday 21^st May 2021 to begin exploring the vast Martian plain of Utopia Planitia.

Zhurong, which landed on Mars a week earlier on May 14^th 2021 is expected to spend the next 3 months mapping the area, searching for signs of water ice, monitoring weather and studying the surface composition.

Photos from Zhurong released by the China National Space Administration show views from the rover's navigation cameras. In one image, the rover is still atop its lander and looking down at the twin ramps it took to roll onto the Martian surface. A second photo looks back at Zhurong's three-legged lander, which delivered the rover to the Martian surface last week.

The lander for China's Mars rover Zhurong is seen from the Martian surface for the first time in this image from the rover's rear hazard avoidance camera on 21^st May 2021.

Zhurong is designed to last at least 90 Martian days on Mars. It is equipped with high-resolution cameras for photographing and mapping its Utopia Planita home. The rover also carries a subsurface radar to look inside the Martian surface, a multi-spectral camera and surface composition detector, a magnetic field detector and a weather monitor.

The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, meanwhile, is expected to study Mars for at least a full Martian year, about 687 Earth days.