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After traveling hundreds of millions of kilometers in space since last summer, three robotic explorers are ready to brake on Mars.
The stakes – and the anxiety – are very high.
The United Arab Emirates orbiter reached March on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by the Chinese orbiter-rover combo. NASA’s rover, the Cosmic Caboose, will arrive at the scene a week later, on February 18, to collect rocks for their return to Earth – a key step in determining whether life ever existed on Mars.
The United Arab Emirates and China are newcomers to Mars, where more than half of Earth’s emissaries have failed. China’s first mission to Mars, a joint effort with Russia in 2011, has never passed Earth orbit.
“We are very excited as engineers and scientists, both quite stressed and happy, worried, scared,” said Omran Sharaf, project manager for the Emirates Mars mission.
The three spacecraft exploded within days of each other last July, during an Earth-Mars launch window that only takes place every two years. This is why their arrivals are also close to each other.
Called Amal, which means “hope” in Arabic, 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 – to better monitor the Earth’s surface. weather.
The Chinese duo – called Tianwen-1, or “Quest for Heavenly Truth” – will remain paired in orbit until May, when the rover splits up to descend to the dusty, ruddy surface. If all goes well, it will only be the second country to successfully land on the Red Planet.
The US rover Perseverance, on the other hand, will immediately dive for a heart-wrenching aerial crane touchdown similar to the large Martian entrance to the Curiosity rover in 2012. The odds are in NASA’s favor: it succeeded eight of its nine landing attempts on March.
Despite their differences – the One-Ton Perseverance is larger and more elaborate than the Tianwen-1 rover – both will prowl looking for signs of ancient microscopic life.
Perseverance’s $ 3 billion mission is the first step in a US-European effort to bring samples from Mars to Earth over the next decade.
“To say we’re excited about this, well, that would be an understatement,” said Lori Glaze, director of planetary science at NASA.
Perseverance aims for an ancient river delta that seems like a logical place to once harbor life. The landing zone in Jezero Crater was so treacherous that NASA turned it down for Curiosity, but so enticing that scientists are keen to get their hands on its rocks.
“When scientists take a look at a site like Jezero Crater, they see the promise, right?” said Al Chen, who is in charge of the entry, descent and landing team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “When I look at Jezero, I see the danger. There is danger everywhere.
Steep cliffs, deep pits, and rock fields could cripple or doom Perseverance, after its seven-minute atmospheric dive. With a communication delay of 11 ½ minutes each way, the rover will be alone, unable to rely on flight controllers. Amal and Tianwen-1 will also have to function autonomously during maneuvers in orbit.
Until Perseverance, NASA searched for flat, boring land to land on – “a giant parking lot,” Chen said. This is what the Chinese rover Tianwen-1 will aim for in Mars’s Utopia Planitia.
NASA is improving its game with new navigation technology designed to guide the rover to a safe place. The spacecraft also has a host of cameras and microphones to capture the sights and sounds of the descent and landing, a Martian first.
Faster than previous vehicles on Mars but still moving at an icy pace, the six-wheeled Perseverance will pass through Jezero, collecting the most attractive rock and gravel samples. The rover will put the samples aside for recovery by a recovery rover launched in 2026.
Under an elaborate plan still being developed by NASA and the European Space Agency, the geological treasure would arrive on Earth in the early 2030s. Scientists say this is the only way to determine if the life flourished on a humid, watery Mars 3-4 billion years ago.
NASA science mission chief Thomas Zurbuchen considers it “one of the most difficult things ever done by mankind and certainly in space science.”
The United States is still the only country to have successfully landed on Mars, beginning with the Vikings of 1976. Two spacecraft are still active on the surface: Curiosity and InSight.
Crashed Russian and European spaceships litter the Martian landscape, as does the failed 1999 NASA Mars Polar Lander.
Getting into orbit around Mars is less complicated but still not easy, with a dozen spaceships down. Flyovers over Mars were all the rage in the 1960s and most failed; NASA’s Mariner 4 was the first to be successful in 1965.
Six spacecraft are currently operating around Mars: three from the United States, two from Europe, and one from India. The UAE hopes to make seven with its more than $ 200 million mission.
The UAE is especially proud that Amal was designed and built by its own citizens, who partnered with the University of Colorado at Boulder and other American institutions, and not just bought from overseas. His arrival on Mars coincides with the 50th anniversary of the founding of the country this year.
“Starting the year with this milestone is something very important for the people” of the UAE, Sharaf said.
China did not disclose long in advance. Even the exact time of the spacecraft’s arrival on Wednesday has yet to be announced.
Ye Peijian, of the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, noted that Tianwen-1 had three objectives: to orbit the planet, to land and to free the rover. If successful, he said in a statement, “it will become the world’s first Mars expedition to achieve all three objectives with a single probe.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated every leg of each spacecraft’s 300 million kilometer journey to Mars. It even kept the European and Russian space agencies’ joint mission to Mars on the ground until the next launch window in 2022.
Flight control rooms will contain fewer people on D-Day, with staff spread over a larger area and working from home. The offices have dividers and partitions. Masks and social distancing are mandatory.
Perseverance deputy project director Matt Wallace, who is working on his fifth rover mission to Mars, said the pandemic would not affect the mood on the day of landing.
“I don’t think COVID will be able to stop us from jumping up and down and hitting our fists,” he said. “You’re going to see a lot of happy people no matter what, once we get this thing to the surface safely.”
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