Study and construction of landing test site for Mars rover

Mars is far away from the Earth, the communication delay is about 20 minutes, and the surface terrain is complex, which is covered with rock, slope, and other obstacles. The Mars rover needs to land on Mars automatically, accompanied by many uncontrollable factors. To guarantee the Martian rover landing safely, a method with multidisciplinary intersection including materials science, geomorphology and geomechanics is employed to simulate the main characteristics of the Martian surface. On this basis, to ensure the test site constructed and used economically, environmentally friendly and re-arranged in different cases quickly, a method with a combination of mobile and fixed regions is used to study and then construct the landing test site in different functional regions. Thereafter, the laser and microwave characteristics and the bearing capacity are measured in geomorphology and landing areas respectively. The test results show that the layout of the test site is reasonable, and the detachable equipments in each area are easy to handle so as to set the various test conditions effectively. They have good agreement with the target values in the laser and microwave tests on geomorphology area and those in the bearing capacity tests in the landing area. This test site has been used for "Tianwen-1" program with the aim of obstacle avoidance and landing safely, which has paved a way for Tianwe-1 probe to successfully land on the pre-selected landing zone in the Utopian Plain of Mars.