This engineer is the leader of China's first successful Mars mission, which landed a rover on the planet.
Smriti Mallapaty is a writer.
On 15 May, the Chinese man wiped tears from his eyes as he watched the landing of China's Mars rover. The person who coordinated the mission was overwhelmed.
The China National Space Administration had never before sent a successful mission to Mars and the touchdown marked the end of a 475-million-kilometre journey full of peril.
The landing gave him a taste of the old Chinese saying, "It takes ten years to sharpen a good sword." The United States is the only nation that has placed a rover on Mars, which is notorious for crushing the hopes of space agencies.
China's team faced many unknowns in a strange environment. He is the chief designer of the Mars mission and is responsible for coordinating a team of tens of thousands. The project consists of a lander and a rover. The buck stops with him, says David Flannery, an astronomer at the University of Technology.
The mission was one of three to land on Mars in 2021. The success of China's mission has made a national hero of Zhang, who has appeared numerous times on state media, but rarely talks to the press outside China. He replied to Nature by e-mail.
The primary goal of the mission was to demonstrate China's prowess in deep-space missions that travel beyond the Moon. Getting rich and high-quality information from Mars was a key consideration in the design. Researchers say that the data generated by the rover and the other instruments will help to understand a previously unexplored patch of the planet.
In 1966 he was born in the eastern China town of Anling and studied engineering at the Xidian University. He has worked on Earth-observation satellites, after completing a master's degree at the Chinese Academy of Space Technology.
Lu Pan, a planetary scientist at the University of Copenhagen, says that the decision to send a rover to Mars in one shipment was probably made by Zhang. The researchers say that the choice of instruments and landing site will help to ensure that the mission will generate as much research as possible.
Wenzhe Fa, a planetary scientist at Peking University, Beijing, is analyzing radar data from the Mars mission.
The lander and rover were dropped in May after arriving at the red planet in February. The crater named Utopia Planitia is a relatively safe place to land. Since then, the rover has traveled more than 1,200 metres south, taking panoramic images as well as selfies that have been widely shared online.
The Sun interfered with communications between Mars and the Earth in September, but it came back to work in October. It is heading towards a region that may have been the coastline of an ancient ocean, where researchers will look for clues about the evolution of Mars.
The mission has produced limited science so far, but data collected by some instruments on the rover and the orbiter have been shared with more than two dozen teams across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macau. They will learn about the geology of the Utopia Planitia region and the fate of water on the planet.
The country will need to focus on research instead of demonstrating engineering for its deep-space missions to take a big leap. Pan says that the switch has already happened with China's lunar missions. These processes take a long time.
The next round of planetary missions will bring the real research riches for China. China will launch sample-return missions to the asteroid Kamooalewa and the red planet before the year 2030. It has its sights set on Jupiter as well.
Researchers say that the field of planetary science in China has received a boost.
A new generation of scientists is being created.
