On February 9, The UAE spacecraft is expected to enter orbit around Mars after a six-month journey, 300 million miles from Earth. It will mark the beginning of a historic month for the Red Planet, which will see three separate national missions enter orbit or reach the surface. Two of the countries behind these missions, the UAE and China, will visit Mars for the first time; will become the fifth and sixth country to complete that feat. The third mission, launched by NASA, is expected to become the 15th mission of the United States to successfully orbit or land on Mars.
The UAE is the only country that will not attempt an easy landing during the February invasion of Mars. Instead, its orbiter Hope will study the Martian atmosphere from more than 12,000 miles above the surface. Planetary scientists hope that the UAE robot 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 spacecraft.
“Indeed, there is no point in exploring outer space without adding knowledge, and we have never conducted a scientific mission,” said Sarah Bint Yousef Al Amiri, the UAE Minister of State for Advanced Science and Chief Scientific Officer for the Emirates Mars Mission. a press conference last week. “It wasn’t an easy journey, but it was such a pleasure to rethink how you develop a planetary exploration mission.”
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 the newcomer for long. China’s Tianwen-1 mission – which is a lander, a rover and an orbiter wrapped in one – is expected to arrive less than a day later. China’s space agency has been quiet about its plans to visit the Red Planet, but expects the spacecraft to attempt a landing shortly after it reaches orbit.
Unlike Curiosity and Opportunity, the Mars rover the size of a NASA car, the Tianwen-1 rover in China is small enough to be stored inside the stationary lander that will transport it to the surface. Once safely reached, the six-wheeled rover will detach from the lander and spend the next three months exploring the landing site, Utopia Planitia, the largest impact crater on the planet. The rover and lander will transmit both data from the surface to the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which will send them back to Earth. Although the Chinese National Space Administration did not provide 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 global and comprehensive survey of the entire planet.”
On February 18, just over a week after the arrival of this robotic delegation, NASA’s Perseverance rover is expected to hit. This will involve a terrible descent to the surface, during which the rover has to reduce its speed from over 10,000 miles per hour to just a few meters per second for 15 minutes. The descent will end with some aerial acrobatics, during which a rocket sky crane will gently drop the rover to the surface while moving a few tens of meters above the ground.
“Don’t let anyone else tell you – landing on Mars is hard to do,” John McNamee, project manager for NASA’s Perseverance at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “But the women and men on this team are the best in the world in what they do. When our spacecraft reaches the top of Mars’ atmosphere at about three and a half miles per second, we will be ready. “