Mars facing Earth ‘invasion’ as three countries prepare launch
● America, China and UAE sending unmanned craft to the red planet
is about to be “invaded” by planet Earth, with the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates all sending unmanned spacecraft to the red planet in quick succession beginning this week.
The missions represent the most sweeping effort yet to seek signs of ancient microscopic life while scouting out potential camp areas for future astronauts.
The three nearly simultaneous launches are no coincidence: The timing is dictated by the opening of a onemonth 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 spacecraft, named Amal, which is Arabic for Hope, is an orbiter scheduled to rocket away from Japan on Wednesday, 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.
“The UAE wanted to send a very strong message to the Arab youth,” project manager Omran Sharaf said.
“The message here is that if the UAE can reach Mars in less than 50 years, then you can do much more . ... The nice thing about space, it sets the standards really high.”
Controlled from Dubai, the celestial weather station will strive for an exceptionally high Martian orbit to study the upper atmosphere and monimars tor climate change. China will be up next, with the flight of a rover and an orbiter sometime around July 23; Chinese officials are not divulging much.
The mission is named Tianwen, or Questions for Heaven.
Nasa, meanwhile, is shooting for a launch on July 30 from Cape Canaveral. The US is sending 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.
“Right now, more than ever, that name is so important,” Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine said as preparations went on amid the coronavirus outbreak, which will keep the launch guest list to a minimum.
Each spacecraft will travel more than 300 million miles before reaching Mars next February. It takes six to seven months, at the minimum, for a spacecraft to loop out beyond Earth’s orbit and sync up with Mars’ more distant orbit around the sun.
“Trying to confirm that life existed on another planet, it’s a tall order. It has a very high burden of proof,” said Perseverance’s project scientist, Ken Farley of Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Mars has proved to be the graveyard for numerous missions. Spacecraft have blown up, burned up or crash-landed, with the casualty rate over the decades exceeding 50 per cent.
Perseverance is set to touch down in an ancient river delta and lake known as Jezero Crater, not quite as big as Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. China’s much smaller rover will aim for an easier, flatter target.
To reach the surface, both spacecraft will have to plunge through Mars’ hazy red skies in what has been dubbed “seven minutes of terror”, the most difficult and riskiest part of putting spacecraft on the planet. Ground controllers will be helpless, given the time it takes radio transmissions to travel one-way between Earth and Mars.
Perseverance will also release a 4lb helicopter that will be the first to fly on another planet. And the rover will attempt to produce oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the thin Martian atmosphere.
Extracted oxygen could someday be used by astronauts on Mars for breathing as well as for making rocket propellant.