On February 9, The UAE spacecraft Hope is expected to orbit Mars after a six-month journey 300 million kilometers from Earth. It will mark the start of a historic month for the red planet, which will see three different national missions enter orbit or touch the surface. Two of the countries behind these missions, the United Arab Emirates and China, will visit Mars for the first time; they will become the fifth and sixth countries to achieve this feat, respectively. The third mission, launched by NASA, is expected to become the 15th U.S. mission to successfully orbit or land on Mars.
The United Arab Emirates is the only country that will not attempt a soft landing during the invasion of Mars in February. Instead, its Hope orbiter will study the Martian atmosphere more than 12,000 miles above the surface. Planetary scientists hope the UAE robor-meteorologist will fill gaps in our understanding of the Martian climate and help validate environmental data captured by rovers and landers on the ground. For the country’s first foray into deep space exploration, the UAE space agency worked with an international team of researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to help plan the mission and build the spaceship.
“It makes no sense to explore outer space without adding knowledge, and we have never carried out any scientific mission,” said Sarah Bint Yousef Al Amiri, the state minister of advanced science and leader of science at the Emirates Mission. Mars, in the United Arab Emirates. a press conference last week. “It wasn’t an easy trip, but it was a pleasure to rethink how a planetary exploration mission unfolds.”
The Hope spacecraft will be the first new orbiter around Mars since the European Space Agency’s ExoMars spacecraft arrived in 2016, but it won’t be new for long. China’s Tianwen-1 mission – which is a lander, a rover and a single orbiter – 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 ship is expected to attempt to land shortly after reaching orbit.
Unlike the curiosity and opportunity of NASA-sized vehicle-sized rovers, China’s Tianwen-1 rover is small enough to be stored inside the fixed landing that will bring it to the surface. Once safely dropped, the six-wheeled rover will detach from the landing and spend the next three months exploring its landing site, Utopia Planitia, the largest impact crater on the planet. The rover and lander will relay data from the surface to the Tianwen-1 orbit, which will send it back to Earth. Although the Chinese National Space Administration has not provided many details about the exact scientific objectives of its mission, a paper on it was published last year in Nature Astronomy says the agency’s goal is to “conduct a comprehensive, comprehensive survey of the entire planet.”
On February 18, just over a week after this robotic delegation arrived, NASA’s rover Perseverance is expected to touch down. This will involve a heartbreaking descent to the surface, during which the rover will have to reduce its speed from more than 10,000 miles per hour to a few feet per second over the course of 15 minutes. The descent will end with some aerial stunts, during which a rocket-propelled sky crane will gently deposit the rover on the surface while standing 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 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Perseverance mission, said in a statement. “But the women and men of this team are the best in the world for what they do. When our spacecraft reaches the top of Mars’ atmosphere at about three and a half kilometers per second, we will be ready.