On February 9 The United Arab Emirates Hope spacecraft is expected to enter orbit around Mars after a six-month journey of 300 million miles from Earth. It marks the beginning of a historic month for the Red Planet, in which three separate national missions will orbit or land on the surface. Two of the countries behind these missions, the UAE and China, will visit Mars for the first time; they will become the fifth and sixth countries respectively to achieve that performance. The third mission, launched by NASA, is expected to become the United States’ 15th mission to successfully land in orbit around or on Mars.
The UAE is the only country that will not attempt to make a soft landing during the Mars invasion in February. Instead, its Hope orbiter will study Mars’ atmosphere from more than 20,000 miles above the surface. Planetary scientists hope the UAE robo-meteorologist will fill gaps in our understanding of the climate on Mars and help validate environmental data captured by rovers and landers on the ground. For the country’s first attempt at deep space exploration, the UAE space agency partnered with an international team of researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to help plan the mission and build it. spacecraft.
“There’s really no point in exploring space without adding knowledge, and we’ve never conducted a science mission,” said Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri, United Arab Emirates’ Secretary of State for advanced sciences and science. leader for the Emirates Mars mission. last week a press conference. “It wasn’t an easy journey, but it was so much fun rethinking how to develop a planetary exploration mission.”
The Hope spacecraft will be the first new orbit around Mars since the European Space Agency’s ExoMars spacecraft arrived in 2016, but it won’t be the newcomer for long. China’s Tianwen-1 mission – a lander, rover and orbiter combined – is expected to arrive less than a day later. The Chinese space agency has been silent on its plans to visit the Red Planet, but the craft is expected to attempt a landing shortly after entering orbit.
Unlike NASA’s Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity, the size of a car, the Chinese Tianwen-1 rover is small enough to store in the stationary lander that will take it to the surface. Once safely landed, the six-wheeled rover will detach itself from the lander and spend the next three months exploring the Utopia Planitia landing site, the largest impact crater in the world. The rover and lander both send data from the surface to the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which sends it back to Earth. While the Chinese National Space Administration has not provided much detail on the exact scientific goals of its mission, a paper was published on it last year in Nature Astronomy says the agency’s goal is to “conduct a global and comprehensive survey of the entire planet.”
On Feb. 18, just over a week after this robotic delegation arrives, NASA’s Perseverance rover is expected to land. This will involve a thrilling descent to the surface, requiring the rover to reduce its speed from over 10,000 miles per hour to just a few feet per second in 15 minutes. The descent will end with some aerial acrobatics, where a rocket-powered aerial crane will gently drop the rover onto the surface while hovering a few dozen feet above the ground.
“Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – landing on Mars is hard to do,” John McNamee, project manager for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “But the women and men on this team are the best in the world at what they do. If our spacecraft reaches the top of the Martian atmosphere at about three and a half miles per second, we’re done. “