The skies over Mars will see some impressive flight demonstrations in the next few days as three competitive space robot probes reach the red planet after traveling for millions of miles across space.
The UAE Hope Orbiter will arrive first, Tuesday, followed by the Tianwen-1 spacecraft in China the next day. Finally, the U.S. rover’s victory descends to the surface of Mars on February 18th.
It is an amazing armada that reflects the growing desire of many countries to develop their own space technology and study the solar system. But how well they succeed when they reach their target this week is yet to be seen, though. Mars is a relentless place to visit.
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Of the dozens of Mars missions since 1960, about half have lost or completely lost the planet, thanks to component failures, rocket engine mishaps or software errors.
“It can be a heartbreaking business,” admitted UK physicist Colin Wilson, of Oxford University. “I have had instruments on two previous Mars missions – the British Beagle lawyer and the European Schiaparelli probe – and each time I was in the control room, clutching my chair, while and they came down. And both times the probes fell. ”
Mars is a difficult destination for a number of reasons. First, it’s millions of miles away, noted astrobiologist Susanne Schwenzer from the Open University. “It’s not like going to the moon which is only a quarter of a million miles away. That’s the equivalent of a putt in a game of golf. Mars, on the other hand, is a long way off. In the case of golf it is the equivalent of a full tee shot and a lot harder. ”
Plus, Mars has an atmosphere but not a thick feel. “That means there is enough air to encourage dust and wind storms that will push and push your landlord off course and into danger,” Wilson said. “On the other hand, it’s not thick enough to allow you to use a parachute for whole probe rescue.”
In the past, U.S. space engineers have relied on inserting airbags into their probes allowing kicks to stop after being dropped from a parachute. However, Nasa ‘s new generation of rovers is too complex and heavy for such maneuvers and endurance will rely on a rocket platform called a skylight to bring it down to the Martian surface.
This approach was used once before, in 2012, to land the U.S. Curver Curver. Now perseverance, a much heavier rider, will continue on a journey called Nasa’s “seven minutes of horror”. That is the time it will take the SUV – sized rover, weighing more than a ton, to reach the surface of Mars after hitting the planet ‘s high feel at over 13,000mph.
Air friction will bring the first cut in speed. A large parachute is then automatically released which will cut the speed of the probe to a few hundred miles per hour. The rocket engines will then fire into the sky and the probe will fly until it goes about 20 meters above the surface of the red planet.
The mast lowers the rover on cables so that it touches the surface, the cables are cut and the mast goes off to land without managing a safe distance from Perseverance. Only then will a message be sent to Nasa engineers to tell them the good news.
In contrast, the UAE spacecraft, the first interplanetary spacecraft in the Arab world, will have a pretty simple time this week. It is designed just to orbit Mars, which it accomplishes by making a 30-minute shot of its main engine.
The success of the alter will delay the spacecraft long enough to be captured by Mars’ gravity field and enter orbit around it. Hope then spends the next two years exploring Mars to gain a better understanding of how it lost, over billions of years, a thick feeling that was able to hold up a mist of water on its surface but passed slowly changing to a cold and wet world.
Tianwen-1 in China is also expected to enter Martian orbit this week. He will explore the planet for several months before landing a surface that will carry a 250kg robot on the planet. If it worked, China would only be the second country in the world to land a robot vehicle on another world, after the USA.
“China has already landed safely on the moon, but this is a far greater achievement and will really show what their space scientists can do today,” Schwenzer said.
Crucially, the three probes are part of a series of missions that in the coming years should transform our knowledge of the planet, by returning Martian rock and earth samples to Earth for study. This activity will be initiated by Perseverance, which plans to identify promising geological sites, extract ground samples and leave cages in specific locations. Future missions, involving Europe and the US, will then retrieve these samples and bring them back to Earth.
“When we do that, we hope to find answers to the simple question: is there, or was there, life on Mars,” Schwenzer said.
“It’s an important issue – because if life on Mars grew, independently of life on Earth, that means that life has grown twice, individually, in the same solar system and it seems to be common in the cosmos. ”