The sky above Mars will see striking aviation exhibits in the next few days as three competing space probes reach the red planet after traveling millions of kilometers through space.
The United Arab Emirates’ probe Hope Orbit arrives first on Tuesday, followed by China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft the next day. Finally, on February 18, the American Rover Perseverance will make its dramatic descent to the surface of Mars.
It is a remarkable armada that reveals the growing desire of many countries to develop their own space technology and explore the solar system. However, how well they succeed when they reach their goal this week and next year remains to be seen. Mars is an unforgiving place to visit.
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Of the dozens of Mars missions since 1960, about half have completely crashed or missed the planet, thanks to component failures, rocket engine accidents or software failures.
“It could be a heartbreaking undertaking,” admits British physicist Colin Wilson of Oxford University. ‘I had instruments at two previous Mars missions – the British Beagle Lander and the European Schiaparelli probe – and I was in the control room every time as I clung to my seat during their descent. And on both occasions, sins sinned. ”
Mars is a difficult destination for several reasons. First, it is millions of miles away, pointed out Astrobiologist Susanne Schwenzer of the Open University. ‘It’s not like going to the moon which is only a quarter of a million kilometers away. This is the equivalent of a hole in a golf game. In contrast, Mars is incredibly far away. As far as golf is concerned, it is the equivalent of a complete tee and much more troublesome. ‘
In addition, Mars has an atmosphere, but not a thick atmosphere. “This means there is enough air to cause dust storms and winds that put your lander off course and endanger you,” Wilson added. “On the other hand, it is not thick enough to allow parachutes to be used for the entire descent of a sin.”
In the past, American space engineers relied on fitting airbags to their sins so they could jump to a halt after jumping out of a parachute. However, Nasa’s new generation of rovers is too complicated and heavy for such maneuvers, and perseverance would rather rely on a rocket platform, an aerial crane, a celestial crane to lower it to the Martian surface.
This technique was used once before, in 2012, to land the American rover Curiosity. Now Perseverance, a much heavier crossbar, will follow suit on a journey called Nasa’s “seven minutes of terror”. This is the time it takes the SUV-sized rover, which weighs more than a ton, to reach the surface of Mars after hitting the planet’s upper atmosphere by more than 13,000 km / h.
Atmospheric friction will cause the first deceleration. Then a large parachute is automatically released and this will reduce the speed of the probe to a few hundred kilometers per hour. Then the crane’s engines will fire from the crane and the probe will slow down until it floats about 20 meters above the surface of the red planet.
The crane will lower the rover on cables until it touches the surface, the cables will be cut off and the air crane will fly to make its own uncontrolled landing a safe distance from endurance. Only then will a message be conveyed to the Nasa engineers to let them know the good news.
In contrast, the UAE’s spacecraft Hope, the Arab world’s first interplanetary spacecraft, will be relatively simple this week. It is only designed to orbit Mars, which it will achieve by performing a 30-minute combustion of its main engine.
If the burn is successful, it will slow down the spacecraft sufficiently so that it can be captured by Mars’ gravitational field and revolve around it. Hope then spends the next two years studying Mars to better understand how he lost more than billions of years a thick atmosphere that was able to sustain water vapor on its surface, but which slowly in a cold and arid world has changed.
China’s Tianwen-1 also plans to go to Mars orbit this week. It will study the planet for several months before dropping a lander carrying a 250kg robot bar to the planet. If it works, China will only become the second nation in the world to successfully land a robotic vehicle in another world, after the US.
“China has already landed safely on the moon, but it will be a much bigger achievement and will really show what their space scientists can do today,” Schwenzer said.
Most importantly, the three sins are part of a spearhead of missions that should transform our knowledge of the planet in the years to come by sending Mars rock and soil samples back to Earth for study. This task will be started by Perseverance, which is planned to determine promising geological sites, extract soil samples and leave casts of them at selected locations. Future missions, involving Europe and the US, will then pick up these monsters and bring them back to Earth.
“If we do, we will hopefully get answers to the simple question: is there, or was there, life on Mars,” Schwenzer added.
“This is an important matter – because if life on Mars evolved independently of life on earth, it means that life evolved twice, separately, in the same solar system and is likely to be common in the cosmos.”