China soft lands a probe on Mars.

[Anomalocaris]

The Chinese Mars probe Tianwen-1 successfully detached a lander bearing the rover named Zhurong to soft land on Utopia Planitia, inside Mars’ northern lowlands.   This makes China the third country to successfully soft land a probe on Mars, the second to land a rover on Mars, but the first to successfully do either on its very first try.

As yet, the rover is still sitting on the lander.  Whether the rover will successful drive itself off the lander onto Martian surface and start roving is yet to be seen.

Pretty impressive. Don't you mean the first landing about which China has told us? How many failures have they had, and is this actually the first?

I seem to have read somewhere, about another totalitarian government in the space race. I of course refer to the USSR. It seems they sent several craft up with animals before success. Also Yuri Gagarin was in fact the first Soviet Cosmonaut to survive.

Be fascinated to learn such state secrets about North Korea. It'll probably come out at some point, but probably not within my lifetime.

Actually, each of china’s manned, lunar or deep space missions during the last 20 years were announced years in advance.    For them to have hidden previous failed missions, they would have to have known the mission was going to fail during the planning stage, decided to hide the upcoming failure long in advance, and then launched it to its doom anyway.   

This particular mission was televised near live from launch to touch down.  It showed no indication of any preparedness to hide a failure.    Over the last 30 years, the Chinese have also announced most of the launch and mission failures, although they were not always forthcoming about the reasons for the failure. 

It is true Yuri Gagarin was the first cosmonaut to survive.   But that was because he was the first to fly, so no cosmonaut had previously had a chance to either survive or die on a mission.   And none would die on a mission for another 6 years.