CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – Mars is about to be invaded by planet Earth – in a big way.
Three countries, the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates, are sending unmanned spacecraft to the red planet in rapid succession starting this week, in the largest effort yet to search for signs of ancient microscopic life as they explore the site. for future astronauts. .
For its part, the United States is sending a car-sized six-wheeled rover, called Perseverance, to collect samples of rocks that will be brought to Earth for analysis in about a decade.
“Right now, more than ever, that name is so important,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine as preparations were made amid the coronavirus outbreak, which will keep the launch invite list to a minimum.
Each spacecraft will travel more than 300 million miles (483 million km) before reaching Mars next February. It takes at least six to seven months for a spacecraft to go beyond Earth’s orbit and synchronize with Mars’ most 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 could have allowed simple, small organisms to flourish before the planet transformed into the arid, desert wintery world it is today.
“Trying to confirm that life existed on another planet is a difficult task. It has a very high burden of proof, ”said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech in Pasadena, California.
The three almost simultaneous launches are not a coincidence: the timing is dictated by the opening of a month-long window in which Mars and Earth are in ideal alignment on the same side of the sun, minimizing travel time and fuel usage. This window is opened only once every 26 months.
Mars has long wielded powerful control over the imagination, but has proven to be the graveyard for numerous missions. Spaceships exploded, caught fire, or landed, with a casualty rate over the decades of over 50%. China’s last attempt, in collaboration with Russia in 2011, ended in failure.
Only the US has successfully launched a spacecraft on Mars, doing so eight times, starting with the twin Vikings in 1976. Two NASA landers are operating there, InSight and Curiosity. Six other spacecraft are exploring the planet from orbit: three Americans, two Europeans, and one from India.
The UAE and China are looking to join the elite club.
The UAE spacecraft, called Amal, which is Arabic for Hope, is an orbiter that will launch from Japan on Wednesday local time in what will be the first interplanetary mission in the Arab world. The spacecraft, built in collaboration with the University of Colorado Boulder, will reach Mars in the year the UAE marks the 50th anniversary of its founding.
“The UAE wanted to send a very strong message to Arab youth,” said project manager Omran Sharaf. “The message here is that if the UAE can reach Mars in less than 50 years, then you can do much more. … The good thing about the space is that it sets really high standards. “
Controlled from Dubai, the celestial weather station will strive for an exceptionally high Martian orbit of 13,670 miles by 27,340 miles (22,000 kilometers by 44,000 kilometers) to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change.
China will be next, with a rover and orbiter flying around July 23; Chinese officials are not divulging much. The mission is called Tianwen, or Questions for Heaven.
Meanwhile, NASA is aiming for a launch on July 30 from Cape Canaveral.
Perseverance sets in on a former lake and river delta known as Jezero Crater, not as big as Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. China’s much smaller rover will seek an easier, flatter target.
To reach the surface, both spaceships will have to dive through the misty red skies of Mars in what has been called “seven minutes of terror,” the most difficult and risky part of putting spaceships on the planet.
Jezero Crater is filled with rocks, cliffs, sand dunes, and depressions, any of which could end the Perseverance mission. The new orientation and parachute activation technology will help keep the boat out of harm’s way. Ground controllers will be helpless, given the 10 minutes it takes for radio transmissions to travel one-way between Earth and Mars.
The Jezero crater is worth the risks, according to scientists who chose it at more than 60 potential sites.
Where there was water, and Jezero was apparently flush with it 3.5 billion years ago, there may have been life, although it was probably just a simple microbial life, perhaps existing in a slimy film at the bottom of the crater. But those microbes may have left telltale marks on the sediment layers.
Perseverance will search for rocks that contain such biological signatures, if they exist.
It will drill into the most promising rocks and store half a kilogram (about 1 pound) of samples in dozens of titanium tubes that will eventually be recovered by another rover. To prevent Earth’s microbes from contaminating the samples, Adam Stelzner, the mission’s chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, ensures that the tubes are super-sterilized and guaranteed germ-free.
“Yes, I am betting my reputation,” he said.
As it wanders the surface, Perseverance, as well as China’s rover, will look down, using radar to locate any underground pools of water that may exist. Perseverance will also launch a slim 4-pound (1.8 kilogram) helicopter that will be the first helicopter to fly on another planet.
Perseverance’s cameras will record color videos of the rover’s descent, providing humanity’s first look at a parachute opening on Mars, while microphones capture sounds.
The rover will also try to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide in the thin Martian atmosphere. Someday, astronauts on Mars could use extracted oxygen to breathe and to make a rocket booster.
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 space suit material with Perseverance to see how they deal with the harsh Martian environment. .
The account for the Perseverance mission, including the flight and a minimum of two years of operations on Mars, is close to $ 3 billion. The UAE project costs $ 200 million, including launch, but not mission operations. China has not disclosed its costs. Europe and Russia abandoned plans to send a life-seeking rover to Mars this summer after delaying testing and then being hit by COVID-19.
The mission of perseverance is viewed by NASA as a comparatively low-risk way to test some of the technologies it will take to send humans to the red planet and bring them home safely.
“It’s crazy for me to call it low risk because there’s a lot of hard work and billions of dollars,” said Farley. “But compared to humans, if something goes wrong, you’ll be glad you tested it on half a kilogram of rock rather than astronauts.”
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