After China landed their Zhurong Mars rover on the Red Planet yesterday, there was just one important question on everyone’s minds: When are we going to see a robot battle between NASA’s rover and China’s? Okay, maybe that wasn’t immediately the first thing on your mind — but a surprising amount of people are clamoring […]
After China landed its Zhurong Mars rover on the Red Planet yesterday, there was just one important question on everyone’s minds: When are we going to see a robot battle between NASA’s rover and China’s? Okay, maybe that wasn’t immediately the first thing on your mind — but a surprising amount of people are clamoring for an epic fight between the Zhurong lander and Perseverance. Many of them took to social media to voice their support for the battle. From Twitter: Would definitely watch a duel to the death between U.S. and Chinese Mars rovers. Battlebots in Space! https://t.co/mcpkSieIJb james gibney (@jamesgibney) February 24, 2021 It’s time for…. pic.twitter.com/0Ko6y9BJIX — superlorna69 (@superlorna69) May 15, 2021 To Reddit: To Facebook: And who can blame them? An interplanetary robot fight would be awesome. But let’s get one thing out of the way: This is not going to happen. Both countries spent billions upon billions of dollars and yuan — not to mention the untold hours of human labor — to get their craft to the Red Planet. They’re not going to throw it away in a single (but admittedly epic) fight. Not only that, but Perseverance and Zhurong are hundreds of miles away from each other, according to Nature. BUT… what if they did though? Who would win in a martian robot battle between NASA’s Perseverance and China’s Zhurong? Which rover is the pound-for-pound robot fighting champion of the galaxy? To answer that question, we’re going to analyze each rover and score them against one another using four criteria: Weight, reach, speed, and heart. We’ll be drawing on publicly available information about each rover — though we should note that China is tight-lipped about its rover (as with most of its space operations). But we can make a few educated guesses to fill in the gaps.
