111-490: Tianwen -1 Chinese : 天问一号 (also referred to as TW-1 ; simplified Chinese : 天 问 ; traditional Chinese : 天 問 ; lit. ' Heavenly Questions ') is an interplanetary mission by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) which sent a robotic spacecraft to Mars , consisting of 6 spacecraft: an orbiter , two deployable cameras, lander , remote camera, and
222-469: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
333-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
444-510: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
555-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
666-551: A burn of its engines to slow down just enough to be captured by Mars' gravitational pull . The orbiter spent several months scanning and imaging the surface of Mars to refine the target landing zone for the lander/rover. It approached at about 265 km (165 mi) ( periareion , or periapse ) to Mars' surface, allowing a high-resolution camera to return images to Earth and to map the landing site in Utopia Planitia , and to prepare for landing. The landing area selection
777-576: A calibration target that is a French duplicate of a target which is on [NASA's] Curiosity [Mars rover]. The idea is to see how the two datasets compare. The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) aided in the development of a magnetometer installed on the Tianwen -1 orbiter. The Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz has confirmed the group's contribution to
888-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
999-615: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1110-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
1221-531: A drop camera to the surface which was able to photograph both the Zhurong rover and the Tianwen -1 lander. The rover is designed to explore the surface for 90 sols ; its height is about 1.85 m (6.1 ft) and it has a mass of about 240 kg (530 lb). After the rover deployment, the orbiter would serve as a telecommunications relay for the rover while continuing to conduct its own orbital observations of Mars. On 12 July 2021, Zhurong visited
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#17327873498381332-609: A group photo of Zhurong and the Tianwen -1 lander taken by the drop camera. The panoramic image is composed of 24 single shots taken by the NaTeCam before the rover was deployed to the Martian surface. The image reveals that the topography and rock abundance near the landing site was consistent with previous anticipations from the scientist on typical south Utopia Planitia features with small but widespread rocks, white wave patterns, and mud volcanoes. On 22 May 2021 (02:40 UTC),
1443-429: A landing ellipse of approximately 100 by 40 kilometres. In July 2020, CNSA provided landing coordinates of 110.318° East longitude and 24.748° North latitude , within the southern portion of Utopia Planitia , as the specific primary landing site. The area was chosen for being both of scientific interest and being safe enough for landing attempts. Simulated landings have been performed as part of mission preparations by
1554-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1665-478: A pervasive sense of mystery throughout the poem. The content of the Tianwen includes questions regarding various myths, which today are often important informational sources on the historical development of these myths, with the Tianwen representing some of the earliest textual bases of information regarding these myths. The Heavenly Questions was an influence on the later works of the Chuci . David Hinton sees
1776-719: A previous role in China's landing of the Chang'e 4 spacecraft on the far side of the Moon in January 2019. France's Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse , in France, is collaborating on the Zhurong rover. Sylvestre Maurice [ fr ] of IRAP said: For their Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument, we have delivered
1887-509: A radio connection with Tianwen -1. Its mission was to photograph the Tianwen -1 orbiter and the lander's heat shield. Due to the time when it was deployed, it trajectory predicted to do a flyby of Mars with that happening around the orbit insertion date. During its cruise to Mars, the spacecraft completed four trajectory correction maneuvers plus an additional maneuver to alter its heliocentric orbital inclination; it also performed self diagnostics on multiple payloads. After payload checkouts,
1998-535: A resolution of 5 meters per pixel, and maps for automatic crater detection with a resolution of 0.7 meters per pixel.) The accuracy of some of the HiRIC image results were evaluated by comparing them with images generated by the cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter . Using the HiRIC mosaics, the selection team conducted various terrain analyses on potential candidate landing ellipses within
2109-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
2220-414: A series of questions, information regarding the myths alluded to appear more as a series of allusive fragments than as cohesively narrated stories. According to legend, Qu Yuan wrote this series of questions in verse after viewing various scenes depicted on temple murals; specifically, it is said that following his exile from the royal court of Chu, Qu Yuan looked upon the depictions of the ancestors and
2331-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
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#17327873498382442-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
2553-495: A subsidiary of CASC, stated that the performance and control of the future spacecraft's propulsion system has been verified and had passed all requisite pre-flight tests, including tests for hovering, hazard avoidance, deceleration and landing. The main component of the lander's propulsion system consists of a single engine that provides 7,500 N (1,700 lb f ) of thrust. The spacecraft's supersonic parachute system had also been successfully tested. CNSA initially focused on
2664-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
2775-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
2886-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2997-709: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
3108-488: Is a piece contained in the Classical Chinese poetry collection of Chu Ci , which is noted both in terms of poetry and as a source for information on the ancient culture of China, especially the area of the ancient state of Chu . Of all the poems attributed to Qu Yuan , "Tianwen" contains more myths than any of the other pieces which may be attributed to him; however, due to the formal structure of "Tianwen" as
3219-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
3330-642: Is managed by the National Space Science Centre (NSSC) in Beijing . The mission was formally approved in 2016. On 14 November 2019, CNSA invited some foreign embassies and international organizations to witness hovering and obstacle avoidance test for the Mars Lander of China's first Mars exploration mission at the extraterrestrial celestial landing test site . It was the first public appearance of China's Mars exploration mission. As
3441-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
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3552-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
3663-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
3774-648: Is the CNSA's first interplanetary mission, as well as its first independent probe to Mars. The primary goal is therefore to validate China's deep space communications and control technologies , as well as the Administration's ability to successfully orbit and land spacecraft. From a scientific point of view, the mission must meet five objectives: The aims of the mission include searching for evidence of current and past life, producing surface maps, characterizing soil composition and water ice distribution, and examining
3885-489: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
3996-501: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
4107-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
4218-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
4329-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4440-610: The Zhurong rover descended from its lander onto the Martian surface to begin its scientific mission. The first images received on Earth after the rover deployment showed the empty landing platform and the extended rover-descent ramps. During its deployment, the Rover's instrument, Mars Climatic Station, recorded the sound, acting as the second martian sound instrument to record Martian sounds successfully after Mars 2020 Perseverance rover 's microphones. The Zhurong rover deployed
4551-494: The Zhurong rover . The spacecraft, with a total mass of nearly five tons, is one of the heaviest probes launched to Mars and carries 14 scientific instruments. It is the first in a series of planned missions undertaken by CNSA as part of its Planetary Exploration of China program. The mission's scientific objectives include: investigation of Martian surface geology and internal structure, search for indications of current and past presence of water , and characterization of
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4662-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
4773-766: The Chryse Planitia and Elysium Mons regions of Mars in its search for possible landing sites. However, in September 2019 during a joint meeting in Geneva , in Switzerland, of the European Planetary Science Congress-Division for Planetary Sciences, the presenters announced that two preliminary sites in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars have instead been chosen for the anticipated landing attempt, with each site having
4884-625: The Heavenly Question is markedly different from the other sections of the Chuci collection, with the exception of the "Nine Songs" (" Jiuge "). The poetic form of the Heavenly Questions is the four-character line, more similar to the Shijing than to the predominantly variable lines generally typical of the Chuci pieces, the vocabulary also differs from most of the rest of the Chuci , sharing more in common with works in
4995-424: The Heavenly Questions and the "Nine Songs" as introducing a "shamanistic world from the folk tradition" into the literary tradition of Chinese poetry: appearing in form close to the older, oral tradition in Heavenly Questions and the "Nine Songs", these voices from the shamanic world were transformed into poetry of "self-conscious individual authorship" with a personal voice in the " Li Sao ". Other examples of
5106-511: The Heavenly Questions contained in the Chu Ci anthology of the third or fourth century BCE, then progressing to the eighth or ninth century work of Li He influenced by Qu Yuan's Heavenly Questions , and continuing on into the twentieth century with Graham's translation, and through the subsequent use of this motif by Roger Waters in the lyrics for a song by the popular music band Pink Floyd, and then subsequently as cover versions of that song in
5217-723: The July 2020 window , after the United Arab Emirates Space Agency 's Hope orbiter, and before NASA 's Mars 2020 mission, which landed the Perseverance rover with the attached Ingenuity helicopter drone. China's planetary exploration program is officially dubbed the " Tianwen Series". " Tianwen-1 " ( Chinese : 天问一号 ) is the program's first mission, and subsequent planetary missions will be numbered sequentially. The name Tianwen means "questions to heaven" or "quest for heavenly truth", from
5328-533: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
5439-531: The Martian atmosphere , particularly its ionosphere. The mission also serves as a technology demonstration that will be needed for an anticipated Mars sample-return mission proposed for the 2030s. Zhurong will also cache rock and soil samples for retrieval by the later sample-return mission, and the orbiter will make it possible to locate a caching site. In late 2019, the Xi'an Aerospace Propulsion Institute,
5550-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
5661-595: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
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#17327873498385772-660: The Tianwen -1 magnetometer and helped with the calibration of the flight instrument. While the Tianwen -1 orbiter will dispense commands to the Zhurong rover, the Mars Express orbiter of the European Space Agency could serve as a backup. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
5883-430: The Tianwen -1 orbiter and Zhurong rover entered safe mode due to a communications blackout around solar conjunction . Both devices were back to active mode after the ending of the blackout. On 20 May 2022, Zhurong was put into hibernation mode to prepare for the approaching sandstorms and Martian winter, and was programmed to self-awake at an appropriate temperature and sunlight condition. On 27 February 2023,
5994-458: The Tianwen consists in questions rather than answers is somewhat of a problem for mythographers. Nevertheless, the questions themselves open up informative windows into a world of ancient mythology. The informational questions raised by Tianwen are a factor that contributes to the description of Tianwen as "the written treasure of Chinese mythology", or as "the most valuable document in Chinese mythology" (Birrell 1993, 26). The poetic style of
6105-442: The Utopia Planitia region on Mars. After a period spent conducting system checkouts and other planning activities (including taking engineering images of itself), the lander deployed the Zhurong rover for independent surface operations. This rover is powered by solar panels and will probe the Martian surface with radar and conduct chemical analyses on the soil ; it will also look for biomolecules and biosignatures . This
6216-478: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
6327-596: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
6438-788: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Heavenly Questions The Heavenly Questions or Questions to Heaven ( traditional Chinese : 天問 ; simplified Chinese : 天问 ; pinyin : Tiānwèn )
6549-628: The Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity. By 23 January 2020, the Long March 5 Y4 rocket's hydrogen-oxygen engine had completed a 100-seconds test, which was the last engine test prior to the final assembly of the launch vehicle. It successfully launched on 23 July 2020. The three Tianwen -1 spacecraft were launched by Long March 5 Heavy-lift launch vehicle on 23 July 2020. Having traveled for about seven months, it entered Mars orbit on 10 February 2021 by performing
6660-565: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
6771-552: The Mars-bound stack from its initial Earth parking orbit and the combined multinational spacecraft and experiments eventually reentered the atmosphere of Earth in January 2012. In 2014, China subsequently began an independent Mars project. The new Mars spacecraft, consisting of an orbiter and a lander with an attached rover, was developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and
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#17327873498386882-446: The Martian surface consists of a "drop camera" which photographed both the rover itself as well as the Tianwen -1 lander. With a mass of less than 1 kg, the Tianwen -1 remote camera is the lightest artificial object on Mars as of May 2021. On December 31, 2021, the Tianwen -1 orbiter deployed a second deployable camera (TDC-2) into Mars orbit which captured photographs of the Tianwen -1 in orbit to celebrate its achievement of
6993-692: The Russian spacecraft Fobos-Grunt , destined for Mars and Phobos , was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome . The Russian spacecraft carried with it an attached secondary spacecraft, the Yinghuo-1 , which was intended to become China's first Mars orbiter (Fobos-Grunt also carried experiments from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the American Planetary Society ). However, Fobos-Grunt's main propulsion unit failed to boost
7104-516: The area's small thermal inertias and the possible presence of thick dust in the region; Chryse Planitia was eliminated next due to its rough terrain in terms of elevations, slopes, crater densities, and rock abundances. Finally, a region measuring approximately 180 km (110 mi) x 70 km (43 mi) in Utopia Planitia and centered on 24°44′53″N 110°19′05″E / 24.748°N 110.318°E / 24.748; 110.318
7215-551: The center of landing ellipse 16. At 23:18 UTC, on 14 May 2021, the Tianwen -1 lander successfully landed in the preselected landing area in the southern part of the Mars Utopia Planitia . The landing phase began with the release of the protective capsule containing the lander/rover. The capsule made an atmospheric entry followed by a descent phase under parachute, after which the lander used retro-propulsion to soft-land on Mars. On 19 May 2021, CNSA released for
7326-419: The classical poem of the same name written by Qu Yuan ( c. 340–278 BC), an ancient Chinese poet. Tianwen -1's rover is named Zhurong (Chinese: 祝融 号 ), after a Chinese mytho-historical figure usually associated with fire and light. The name was chosen through an online poll held from January to February 2021. China's Mars program started in partnership with Russia. In November 2011,
7437-420: The daytime and solidifies and releases heat at night. The long delay for the publication of the first images is explained by the short periods of time when the Zhurong rover and the orbiter are in radio contact and can effectively communicate and transfer data. On 11 June 2021, CNSA released the first batch of scientific images from the surface of Mars including a panoramic image taken by Zhurong and
7548-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
7659-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
7770-589: The ellipse is defined by a landing probability uncertainty of 3 sigmas); also, the major axis of the landing ellipse is tilted with respect to the Martian north by 1.35 degrees to the west, this is a consequence of the planned orbital descent path. On 14 May 2021 (UTC), the Zhurong rover and its landing platform touched down at 25°03′58″N 109°55′30″E / 25.066°N 109.925°E / 25.066; 109.925 , at an elevation of −4,099.4 m (−13,449 ft), about 3.1 km (1.9 mi) south of
7881-576: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
7992-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
8103-403: The first time images showing the preparation of the final transfer of the Zhurong rover from the platform of the lander to the Martian soil. The photographs show the solar panels of Zhurong already deployed while Zhurong is still perched on the lander along with two circular windows on the deck under which n-undecane was stored in 10 containers that absorbs heat and melts during
8214-569: The force of a catastrophic crash. The beacon would have allowed critical engineering data to be collected to aid future design. The lander also carried the Chinese flag and 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics mascots with it like the orbiter. Argentina's Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE) is collaborating on Tianwen -1 by way of the Espacio Lejano tracking station installed in Las Lajas, Neuquén . The facility played
8325-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
8436-422: The gods painted upon the walls of the ancestral temple of Chu; and, then, in response, wrote his questions to Heaven, upon these same walls. The Heavenly Questions consists of a series of verses, in question format, addressed to Tian , or Heaven. The 172 questions asked revolve around Chinese mythology and ancient Chinese religious beliefs , and perceived contradictions or conundrums existing therein. That
8547-618: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
8658-697: The influence of the Heavenly Questions include the poem written by Li He , which A. C. Graham translates as "Don't Go Out of the Door", which then in turn influenced the lyrics of the Pink Floyd song " Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun ", attributed to Roger Waters . This translation by Graham features the line: "Witness the man who raved at the wall as he wrote his questions to Heaven ". Thus, beginning with
8769-426: The initial results of the meteorological data from the first 325 sols of the mission were published in the journal Nature . To achieve the scientific objectives of the mission, the Tianwen -1 orbiter is equipped with eight scientific instruments, while the Zhurong rover is equipped with six, which include: The lander did not have a scientific payload, but carried a Mars Emergency Beacon designed to survive
8880-537: The lander/rover portion of the mission successfully touched down on Mars, making China the third nation to make a soft landing on and establish communication from the Martian surface, after the Soviet Union and the United States. On 22 May 2021, the Zhurong rover drove onto the Martian surface via the descent ramps on its landing platform. With the successful deployment of the rover, China became
8991-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
9102-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
9213-645: The lowest hazard index, emerged as the primary target (candidate ellipse 128, with the next lowest hazard index, was the backup). See the following figure produced by the landing selection team intended to illustrate the calculation of the hazard indices for candidate ellipses 16 and 128. Ellipse 16 was selected for the attempted landing in May 2021; it is centered on 25°07′08″N 109°55′50″E / 25.1188°N 109.9305°E / 25.1188; 109.9305 with major and minor axes of 55 km (34 mi) and 22 km (14 mi) respectively (the boundary of
9324-482: The mission preparation proceeded, in April 2020, the mission was formally named " Tianwen -1". On 23 July 2020 , Tianwen -1 was launched from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the island of Hainan atop a Long March 5 heavy-lift launch vehicle . In September 2020, the Tianwen -1 orbiter deployed the Tianwen -1 First Deployable Camera (TDC-1), a small satellite with two cameras that took photos of and tested
9435-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
9546-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
9657-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
9768-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
9879-500: The parachute and backshell dropped onto the Martian surface during its landing on 14 May. On 15 August 2021, Zhurong officially completed its planned exploration tasks and will continue to drive towards the southern part of Utopia Planitia where it landed. On 18 August 2021, Zhurong outlived its lifespan of 90 sols and the Chinese scientists and engineers announced an extended expedition aiming to investigate an ancient coastal area on Mars. From mid-September to late October 2021, both
9990-552: The possible presence of ancient ocean on the northern lowlands of Mars. The primary target region was further constrained in extent using the high-resolution camera (HiRIC) on board the Tianwen-1 orbiter after it entered Martian orbit in February 2021. The HiRIC camera collected high resolution stereo images of the primary landing region; these images were built into mosaics of varying resolutions (e.g. digital elevation models with
10101-449: The primary target region in an iterative manner; these analyses included the determination of the candidate ellipse's average slope, the percentage of slope with an angle greater than 8%, average rock abundance, the percentage of area within the candidate ellipse with a rock abundance greater than 10%, and the percentage of cratered area. A 'hazard index' is then distilled from the analyses for each candidate ellipse. Candidate ellipse 16, with
10212-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
10323-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
10434-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
10545-410: The second nation to accomplish this feat, after the United States. In addition, China is the second nation to orbit and the first one to carry out landing and rovering mission on Mars successfully on its maiden attempt. Tianwen -1 is also the second mission to capture audio recordings on the Martian surface, after United States' Perseverance rover . The "smallsat" deployed by the Zhurong rover on
10656-463: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
10767-561: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
10878-508: The space environment and the atmosphere of Mars. The mission was launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on 23 July 2020 on a Long March 5 heavy-lift launch vehicle . After seven months of transit through the inner Solar System , the spacecraft entered Martian orbit on 10 February 2021. For the next three months the probe studied the target landing sites from a reconnaissance orbit. On 14 May 2021,
10989-509: The spacecraft began scientific operations with the Mars Energetic Particle Analyzer, mounted on the orbiter, which transmitted initial data back to ground control. The lander/rover portion of the mission began its Martian landing attempt on 14 May 2021. About nine minutes after the aeroshell housing the lander/rover combination entered the Martian atmosphere, the lander (carrying the rover) safely touched down in
11100-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
11211-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
11322-479: The twenty-first century, Heavenly Questions has had a long and enduring influence upon poetry and song. American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg used the title Heavenly Questions for her elegy of six linked poems on the death of her husband Robert Nozick in 2002. The work won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2011. The title was taken from the Chinese poem. China's interplanetary exploration program
11433-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
11544-458: The wisdom tradition like the Daodejing . David Hinton finds that these features of the work suggest that Heavenly Questions has ancient sources in the oral tradition, although perhaps having been put together into its present form by Qu Yuan. Hinton finds that much of the power of the poetic impact of the Heavenly Questions derives from "its fragmentary and enigmatic character" combined with
11655-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
11766-517: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
11877-639: The year and a selfie stick payload was deployed to its working position on orbiter to take images of the orbiter's components and Chinese flag on 30 January 2022 to celebrate the Chinese New Year . In September 2022, the mission was awarded the World Space Award by the International Astronautical Federation . The Tianwen -1 mission was the second of three Martian exploration missions launched during
11988-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
12099-430: Was based on two major criteria: Three initial areas were selected by the site selection team after a global survey of Mars; the three areas were: Amazonis Planitia , Chryse Planitia , and Utopia Planitia . All three candidate landing areas were between five degrees North and thirty degrees North latitude. According to the site selection team, Amazonis Planitia was dropped from consideration upon further analysis due to
12210-485: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
12321-406: Was selected as the primary target for further analysis (a backup target with about the same total area and centered on 26°28′01″N 131°37′34″E / 26.467°N 131.626°E / 26.467; 131.626 was also selected at that time.) The target landing regions in Utopia Planitia were favored by the selection team also because they present higher chances of finding evidence for
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