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The skies above Mars will see some surprising aeronautical demonstrations in the coming days when three rival space robot probes reach the Red Planet after traveling millions of miles in space.
The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter will arrive first on Tuesday, followed by China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft the following day. Finally, the American rover Perseverance will make its spectacular descent to the surface of Mars on February 18.
It’s a remarkable armada that reveals the growing desire of many nations to develop their own space technology and explore the solar system. It remains to be seen, however, how successful they are when they hit their goal this week and the next. Mars is a ruthless place to visit.
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Of the dozens of missions to Mars since 1960, about half have crashed or completely missed the planet, due to component failures, rocket engine crashes or software errors.
“It can be a heart-wrenching endeavor,” admitted British physicist Colin Wilson of the University of Oxford. “I had instruments on two previous missions to Mars – the British Beagle lander and the European Schiaparelli probe – and each time I was in the control room, gripping my seat, as they descended. And in both cases, the probes crashed.
March is a difficult destination for several reasons. First, it is millions of kilometers away, said 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. It is the equivalent of a putt in a round of golf. In contrast, Mars is incredibly distant. In golf terms, this is the equivalent of a full and much trickier tee shot.
In addition, Mars has an atmosphere, but not thick. “This means there is enough air to trigger dust storms and stinging and pushing winds your lander out of the way and in danger,” Wilson added. “On the other hand, it’s not thick enough to allow you to use parachutes for the entire descent of a probe.”
In the past, American space engineers have relied on mounting airbags on their probes allowing them to bounce to a stop after being dropped from a parachute. However, the new generation of NASA rovers are too complex and heavy for such maneuvers, and Perseverance will instead rely on a rocket platform called a Celestial Crane to lower it to the Martian surface.
This technique was used once before, in 2012, to land the American rover Curiosity. From now on, Perseverance, a much heavier rover, will follow its example in a trip dubbed the “seven minutes of terror” of NASA. That’s the time it will take for the SUV-sized rover, which weighs over a ton, to reach the surface of Mars after hitting the planet’s upper atmosphere at over 13,000 mph.
Atmospheric friction will cause the first reduction in speed. Then a huge parachute will be released automatically and this will reduce the speed of the probe to a few hundred kilometers per hour. Then the Celestial Crane’s rocket motors will fire and the probe will slow down until it hovers about 20 meters above the surface of the Red Planet.
The crane will lower the rover over cables until it touches the surface, the cables will be cut and the overhead crane will fly off to make its own uncontrolled landing at a safe distance from Perseverance. Only then will a message be sent to NASA engineers to let them know the good news.
In contrast, the UAE Hope spacecraft, the Arab world’s first interplanetary spacecraft, will have a relatively straightforward time this week. It is simply designed to orbit around Mars, which it will achieve by burning 30 minutes of its main engine.
If the burn is successful, it will slow the spacecraft enough for it to be captured by Mars’ gravitational field and enter orbit around it. Hope will then spend the next two years studying Mars to better understand how, over billions of years, it lost a thick atmosphere capable of holding water vapor on its surface but which slowly turned into a cold world. and arid.
The 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 transport a 250 kg robot rover to the planet. If that works, China will only become the second nation in the world to successfully land a robotic vehicle on another world, after the United States.
“China has safely landed rovers on the Moon before, but it will be a much bigger achievement and really show what their space scientists can do today,” Schwenzer said.
Importantly, the three probes are part of a spearhead of missions that in the years to come should transform our knowledge of the planet, returning samples of Martian rocks and soil to Earth for study. This task will be initiated by Perseverance, which is to identify promising geological sites, extract soil samples and leave caches in selected locations. Future missions, involving Europe and the United States, will then retrieve these samples and return them to Earth.
“When we do this, we hope to get answers to the simple question: is there or was there life on Mars,” Schwenzer added.
“This is a critical question – because if life evolved on Mars 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.”
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