On February 9, the Hope Arab Emirates spacecraft is expected to enter orbit around Mars after a six-month, 300-million-mile journey from Earth. It marks the beginning of a historic month for the Red Planet, which sees three separate national missions orbit or land on the surface. Two of the countries behind these messages, the UAE and China, will be visiting Mars for the first time; they will be the fifth and sixth country to take away that act, respectively. The third mission, launched by NASA, is expected to be the 15th mission of the United States to successfully land or land on Mars.
The UAE is the only country that did not try to lie soft during the February Mars invasion. Instead, his Hope orbiter explores the Martian atmosphere from more than 12,000 miles above the surface. Planetary scientists hope the UAE robo-meteorologist will fill gaps in our understanding of Martian climate and help validate environmental data captured by predators and settlers on the ground. For the country’s first in-depth space study, a UAE space agency worked with an international team of researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to help design the mission and construction of the spaceship.
“There is no need to explore outer space without adding knowledge, and we have never run a science mission,” said Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri, UAE minister of state for advanced sciences and director of science for the Emirates Mars Mission, during a press conference last week. “It was not an easy journey, but it was a pleasure to rethink how you develop a planetary exploration mission. ”
The Hope spacecraft is the first new orbiter around Mars since the European Space Agency’s ExoMars spacecraft arrived in 2016, but it won’t be a new one for long. The Tianwen-1 mission in China – which is a surface, rover, and orbiter rolled into one – is expected to arrive less than a day later. The space agency in China has been silent about its plans to visit the Red Planet, but the craft is expected to try to land shortly after it reaches orbit.
Unlike NASA-sized Mars car-driven Curiosity and Opportunity, the Tianwen-1 rover in China is small enough to hold it inside the stationery it brings to the surface. Once safely rubbed, the six-wheeled rover detaches from the surface and spends the next three months exploring its landing site, Utopia Planitia, the most impact-cracked. biggest on the planet. The rover and lander both transmit data from the surface to the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which sends it back to Earth. Although China’s National Space Administration has not provided much information on the scientific objectives of its mission, a paper on it was published last year in Astronomy of nature states that the aim of the organization is “to conduct a global and comprehensive study 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 launch. This involves descending a ladder to the surface, when the rover has to reduce its speed from more than 10,000 miles per hour to just a few feet per second over 15 minutes. The descent ends with some aerial aerobics, when a rocket-powered spacecraft gently deposits the rover on the surface as it goes a few dozen feet above the ground.
“Don’t let anyone tell you any differently – it’s hard to land on Mars,” John McNamee, project manager for a permanence mission at NASA’s Jet Deployment Laboratory, said in a statement. “But the women and men on this team are the best in the world at what they do. When our spacecraft hits the top of the Mars atmosphere at about three and a half miles per second, we are ready. ”