Three nations lift off for the Red Planet

Mars is set to get busier after a trio of missions use this summer’s launch window

Three missions launched for Mars in July, taking advantage of the planet’s launch window this summer – when Earth was close enough to the Red Planet to dramatically reduce the time taken to reach Mars. With the next window 26 months away, three space agencies surmounted technical problems and pandemics to reach the launch pad.

First to launch was the Hope probe from the United Arab Emirates – the country’s first planetary space mission

– which launched from the Tanegashima Space Centre in Japan on 19 July. Once at Mars, Hope will act as a weather and climate monitoring station.

“One of the requirements very early on was to send a mission that does more than capture an image declaring that the UAE reached Mars,” said Sarah al-Amiri, UAE’s minister of state for advanced sciences and the deputy project manager of Hope. “We are the very first weather satellite for Mars.”

Then on 23 July, the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) launched its first Mars mission, Tianwen-1 which builds on the successes of the Chang’e lunar landers.

The orbiter half of Tianwen-1 will spend its first few months at Mars scouting out a landing site for its other half, a rover. This vehicle will then study the rocks on the surface, while also using radar to examine those beneath it. The orbiter, meanwhile, will monitor the planet from above.

“Tianwen-1 is a landmark project in the process of building China’s space prowess and a milestone project for China’s aerospace to go further and deeper into space,” says Wu Yansheng, the mission’s deputy project commander.

The launch window for the final mission, NASA’s Perseverance rover, opened on 30 July, after this issue had gone to press. The rover is NASA’s latest step towards bringing back samples from the Martian surface. It will create caches of soil and rock that a future mission will collect and return to Earth.

A fourth mission, ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover, won’t be joining the trio as problems with its landing system meant its launch date had to be pushed back to 2022. The three missions which did make it to the launch pad, however, are due to arrive at Mars in February 2021, when their real work begins. www.emiratesmarsmission.ae; www.cnsa.gov.cn; www.nasa.gov

Main image: the UAE’s Hope spacecraft launches into space on 19 July. Above left: Hope will monitor the Red Planet’s weather and climate. Below: NASA’s Perseverance will collect samples from the surface, ready for return to Earth