China, UAE and US all gearing up to ‘invade’ Mars
MARS is about to be invaded by planet Earth, big time. Three countries – the US, China and the UAE – are sending unmanned spacecraft to the red planet in quick succession beginning this week, in the most sweeping effort yet to seek signs of ancient microscopic life while scouting out the place for future astronauts.
The US, for its part, is dispatching a six-wheeled rover the size of a car, named Perseverance, to collect rock samples that will be brought back to Earth for analysis in about a decade.
Preparations are going on amid the Covid-19 outbreak, which will keep the launch guest list to a minimum.
Each spacecraft will travel more than 483 million kilometres before reaching Mars next February. It takes six to seven months for a spacecraft to loop out beyond Earth’s orbit and sync up with Mars’ more distant orbit around the sun.
Scientists want to know what Mars was like billions of years ago when it had rivers, lakes and oceans that may have allowed simple, tiny organisms to flourish before the planet morphed into the barren, wintry desert world it is today.
The three nearly simultaneous launches are no coincidence: The timing is dictated by the opening of a one-month window in which Mars and Earth are in ideal alignment on the same side of the sun, which minimises travel time and fuel use. Such a window opens only once every 26 months.
The UAE and China are looking to join the elite club.
The UAE spacecraft, named Amal, which is Arabic for Hope, is an orbiter scheduled to rocket away from Japan tomorrow, local time, on what will be the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. The spacecraft, built in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, will arrive at Mars in the year the UAE marks the 50th anniversary of its founding.
Controlled from Dubai, the celestial weather station will strive for an exceptionally high Martian orbit of 22000km by 44000km to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change.
China will be up next, with the flight of a rover and an orbiter sometime late next week. The mission is named Tianwen, or Questions for Heaven. Nasa, meanwhile, is shooting for a launch on July 30 from Cape Canaveral.
Where there was water – and Jezero was apparently flush with it 3.5 billion years ago – there may have been life, though it was probably only simple microbial life, existing perhaps in a slimy film at the bottom of the crater.
Perseverance will hunt for rocks containing such biological signatures, if they exist. It will drill into the most promising rocks and store a half-kilogram of samples in dozens of titanium tubes that will eventually be fetched by another rover.
Nasa wants to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 and send them from there to Mars in the 2030s. To that end, the space agency is sending samples of spacesuit material with Perseverance to see how they stand up against the harsh Martian environment.
The tab for Perseverance’s mission, including the flight and a minimum two years of Mars operations, is close to $3 billion (R50bn). The UAE’s project costs $200m, including the launch but not mission operations. China has not disclosed its costs. Europe and Russia dropped plans to send a life-seeking rover to Mars this summer after falling behind in testing and then getting slammed by Covid-19.