[jbay808]

Did the Soviets make any major attempt for Mars? I thought that after the moon, they were mostly focused on Venus during the space race. Their ~28 Venus missions were no joke, with up to 5300 kg payloads for lander + orbiter, comparable to the Zhurong lander + orbiter payload of 5000 kg. Perhaps someone more skilled at rocket science than me can comment on the relative difficulty of moving mass to Mars vs Venus. From the table in Wikipedia's delta-v article they look about the same.

That said, congratulations to China for this achievement, and the more rovers we have on mars, the more science we learn. I hope China also has a new space telescope on their to-do list.

[yurish]

Soviet Union sent probs on Mars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3