After three robot discoverers have flown hundreds of millions of kilometers through space since last summer, they are ready to brake on Mars.
The interests – and anxiety – are sky high.
The United Arab Emirates’ orbit reached Mars on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by China’s orbiting rover combo. NASA’s rover, the cosmic kaboes, will arrive on the scene a week later, on February 18, to collect rocks for return to Earth – an important step in determining whether life ever existed on Mars. .
Both the UAE and China are newcomers to Mars, where more than half of Earth’s delegates have failed. China’s first Mars mission, a joint effort with Russia in 2011, never made it past Earth’s orbit.
“We are very excited as engineers and scientists, at the same time quite stressed and happy, worried, scared,” said Omran Sharaf, project manager of the Emirates Mars Mission.
All three spacecraft fired away from each other within a few days last July during a launch window from Earth to Mars that only takes place every two years. Therefore, their arrivals are also close to each other.
Called Amal, which in Arabic means “hope”, the Gulf nation’s spacecraft is looking for an elliptical orbit that will keep it 13,500 to 27,000 miles above the Martian surface – all the better to monitor the weather.
China’s duo – called Tianwen-1, or ‘Quest for Heavenly Truth’ – will remain around the track in May until the rover separates to descend to the dusty, reddish surface. If all goes well, it will only be the second country to successfully land on the red planet.
The American Rover Perseverance, on the other hand, will immediately dive for a disturbing sky-crane lining similar to the Curiosity rover’s grand Mars entrance in 2012. The odds are in NASA’s favor: it’s eight of its nine attempts to land on Mars to land.
Despite their differences – the throughput of 1 ton is larger and more complex than the Tianwen-1 rover – both will strive for signs of ancient microscopic life.
Perseverance’s $ 3 billion mission is the first step in a US-European effort to bring Mars monsters to Earth in the next decade.
“To say we were pumped about it, well, that would be a huge understatement,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of planetary science.
Perseverance strives for an old river delta that seems like a logical place to even house life. The landing site in the Jezero crater was so treacherous that NASA tied it up for curiosity, but so teasing that scientists would like to get their hands on the rocks.
“When scientists look at a site like Jezero Crater, they see the promise, right?” says Al Chen, who is in charge of the enrollment, descent and landing team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “When I look at Jezero, I see danger. There was danger everywhere. ”
Steep cliffs, deep wells and rock fields can paralyze or condemn the perseverance due to its seven minutes of atmospheric diving. With a communication delay of 11½ minutes in each direction, the rover will be on its own and will not be able to rely on flight controllers. Amal and Tianwen-1 will also have to work autonomously while moving in orbit.
Until perseverance, NASA was looking for flat, boring terrain on which to land – “one giant parking lot,” Chen said. This is what the Chinese Tianwen-1 rover is going to shoot in Mars’ Utopia Planitia.
NASA is stepping up its game thanks to new navigation technology designed to guide the rover to a safe place. The spacecraft also has a series of cameras and microphones to capture the sights and sounds of descent and landing, a first Marsman.
Faster than previous Mars vehicles, but still moving at an icy pace, the six-wheel-drive endurance will drive over Jezero and collect nuclear samples from the most alluring rocks and gravel. The rover will set the monsters aside for retrieval by a haul rover launched in 2026.
According to an extensive plan still being worked out by NASA and the European Space Agency, the geological treasure would come to Earth in the early 2030s. Scientists claim that this is the only way to determine if life flourished on a wet, watery Mars between 3 and 4 billion years ago.
Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s scientific mission, considers it “one of the most difficult things mankind has ever done, and certainly in space science.”
The US is still the only country to have successfully landed on Mars, starting with the 1976 Vikings. Two spacecraft are still active on the surface: curiosity and insight.
Broken Russian and European spacecraft, meanwhile, are scattering the Martian landscape along with NASA’s failed Mars Polar Lander from 1999.
Going in orbit around Mars is less complicated, but it’s still not easy, with about a dozen spacecraft falling short. Mars flyovers were the rage in the 1960s and failed the most; NASA’s Mariner 4 was the first to succeed in 1965.
Six spacecraft are currently operating around Mars: three from the US, two from Europe and one from India. The UAE hopes to fetch it with its $ 200 million plus mission.
The UAE is particularly proud that Amal was designed and built by its own citizens, who collaborated with the University of Colorado at Boulder and other U.S. institutions, not just bought from overseas. The arrival at Mars coincides with the 50th anniversary of the country’s founding.
“Starting the year with this milestone is something very important for the people of the UAE,” Sharaf said.
China has not announced much before. Even the spacecraft’s exact arrival time on Wednesday has yet to be announced.
The Chinese Academy of Space Technology, Ye Peijian, noted that Tianwen-1 had three objectives: to orbit the planet, land and release the robber. If successful, he said in a statement “it will be the first Mars expedition in the world to achieve all three goals with one sin.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated every step of every 300-mile journey to Mars. It even kept the European and Russian space agencies’ joint Mars mission grounded until the next launch window in 2022.
The flight control rooms will accommodate fewer people on the big day, with staff spread across a wider area and working from home. Desks have dividers and partitions. Masks and social distance are mandatory.
Perseverance’s deputy project manager, Matt Wallace, who is working on his fifth Mars rover mission, said the pandemic would not dampen the mood of the next day.
“I do not think COVID will be able to stop us from jumping up and down and pounding our fists,” he said. “You’ll see a lot of happy people, no matter what, once we get this thing safely to the surface.”