What’s new: Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China’s first Mars mission has been named by the British scientific journal Nature as one of 10 people to have “helped shape science in 2021,” the sole Chinese on the list.
Describing Zhang as a national hero, the journal said that the engineer-trained physicist was central to the successful Mars mission, named Tianwen-1, which reached the red planet in May and landed a rover on its surface.
The landing makes China the second nation after the U.S. to place a rover on Mars, a feat that is “notorious for crushing the hopes of space agencies” with nearly half of all missions to the planet failing, the journal noted.
Lu Pan, a planetary scientist at the University of Copenhagen, said in the Nature article that Zhang probably played a key part in the nation’s space agency decision to send an orbiter, lander and rover to Mars in one shipment — making China the first country to do so.
The background: Born in 1966 in East China’s Anhui province, Zhang studied engineering at Xidian University, and later completed a master’s degree at the Chinese Academy of Space Technology in Beijing.
Zhang’s fellow luminaries on this year’s list include Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician who helped identify the new Covid variant omicron in South Africa, and Winnie Byanyima, a United Nations leader who worked to promote the equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines worldwide.
Contact reporter Wang Xintong (xintongwang@caixin.com) and editor Bertrand Teo (bertrandteo@caixin.com)
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