The skies over Mars will witness some amazing aeronautical displays in the coming days, when three probes of rival space robots reach the red planet after traveling millions of miles through space.
The UAE Hope orbiter spacecraft will arrive first Tuesday, followed by China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft the next day. Finally, the American rover Perseverance will make its dramatic descent to the surface of Mars on February 18.
It is a remarkable navy that reveals the growing desire of many nations to develop their own space technology and explore the solar system. However, it remains to be seen how successful they are when they achieve their goal this week and next. Mars is an unforgivable place to visit.
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Of the dozens of Mars missions since 1960, about half have crashed or lost the entire planet, thanks to component failures, rocket engine mishaps, or software errors.
“It can be a heartbreaking business,” admitted British physicist Colin Wilson of Oxford University. “I’ve had instruments on two missions before Mars: Britain’s Beagle lander and Europe’s Schiaparelli spacecraft, and every time I was in the control room grabbing my seat during their descents. And on both occasions the probes crashed. “
Mars is a difficult destination for several reasons. First, it is millions of miles away, said Open University astrobiologist Susanne Schwenzer. “It’s not like going to the moon, which is only a quarter of a million kilometers away. This equates to a putt in a game of golf. By contrast, Mars is incredibly distant. In terms of golf, it’s the equivalent of a full and much more complicated tee-shot. “
In addition, Mars has an atmosphere but not thick. “This means there is enough air to trigger dust storms and winds that prevent and push your lander into danger,” Wilson added. “On the other hand, it’s not thick enough to allow parachutes to be used throughout the descent of a probe.”
In the past, American space engineers relied on placing airbags in their probes, allowing them to jump to neutral after falling from a parachute. However, NASA’s new generation of rovers is too complex and heavy for these maneuvers and perseverance will be based on a rocket platform called a sky crane to bring it down to the Martian surface.
This technique was used once before, in 2012, to land the American rover Curiosity. Now Perseverance, a much heavier rover, will follow the same in a journey that has been dubbed NASA’s “seven minutes of terror”. This is how long it will take for the SUV-sized rover, which weighs more than a ton, to reach the surface of Mars after hitting the planet’s upper atmosphere at more than 13,000 mph.
Atmospheric friction will cause the first speed cut. Then, a huge parachute will be launched automatically that will reduce the speed of the probe to a few hundred kilometers per hour. The rocket crane engines will then fire and the probe will slow down to about 20 meters above the surface of the red planet.
The crane will lower the cable rover until it touches the surface, the cables will be cut and the sky crane will fly out to make its own uncontrolled landing a safe distance from perseverance. Only then will a message be sent to NASA engineers to let them know the good news.
By contrast, the UAE spacecraft, the first interplanetary spacecraft in the Arab world, will have a relatively simple time this week. It is designed only to orbit Mars, which it will achieve by performing a 30-minute burn from its main engine.
If the burn is successful, the spacecraft will slow down enough so that it can be captured by Mars’ gravitational field and enter orbit around it. Hope will spend the next two years studying Mars to better understand how, for billions of years, it lost a thick atmosphere that was able to keep water vapor on its surface, but that slowly transformed into a world. cold and arid.
Chinese Tianwen-1 is also expected to enter Martian orbit this week. He will study the planet for several months before dropping a lander that will bring a 250 kg rover robot to the planet. If it works, China will become the second nation in the world to successfully land a robot vehicle in another world, after the United States.
“China has already gotten rovers safely to the Moon, but this will be a much bigger success and will really demonstrate what its space scientists can do today,” Schwenzer said.
Crucially, the three probes are part of a spearhead of missions that in the coming years should transform our knowledge of the planet, returning to Earth samples of Martian rock and soil to Earth for study. This task will be initiated by Perseverance, which plans to locate promising geological sites, extract soil samples and leave their memories in certain places. Future missions, involving Europe and the US, will retrieve these samples and return them to Earth.
“When we do, we expect to get answers to the simple question: is there, or has there been, life on Mars,” Schwenzer added.
“It’s a crucial issue, because if life evolved on Mars, regardless of life on Earth, that means life evolved twice, separately, in the same solar system and is likely to be common in the cosmos. “.