Three robotic Mars missions launched from Earth last month have begun finishing their trajectories through the solar system with the first in a series of corrections mid-course to take aim at the Red Planet before arriving next February.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover launched from Cape Canaveral on July 30, following successful launches with the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Orbiter on July 19 and the Tianwen March 1 mission from China on July 23.
The missions launched over a period of several weeks when Earth and Mars were in the correct positions in their orbits around the sun to allow a direct route between the planets. All three spacecraft will arrive on Mars in February 2021.
NASA said on August 14 that the first maneuver of the orbital correction course of March 2020, as TCM, was a success. The spacecraft fired eight thrusters to adjust its course to Mars, and began moving the first point of the probe to the Red Planet after launch.
The mission’s Atlas 5 launcher deliberately released the Mars 2020 spacecraft on a course that Mars would miss, ensuring that the upper stage of the rocket would not crash into the Red Planet.
As of Wednesday, the Perseverance rover had cocooned more than 35 million miles, or 56 million kilometers, in the aerospace of the Mars 2020 spacecraft since it jumped from the Florida Space Coast on July 30.
Mars 2020 mission planners have set up time and propulsion for five trajectory correction maneuvers to refine the spacecraft’s path to Mars and set up the rover to make a precise landing at Jezero Crater, an influential basin that once was a river of liquid water with a river has streamed into it.
The nuclear-powered Perseverance rover will explore the crater, searching for signs of ancient life, while collecting stone nuclear monsters to return to Earth through a future mission.
In addition to the five scheduled course correction burns, Mars 2020 mission managers have opportunities to command the spacecraft to perform backup or contingent maneuvers as needed.
The next burns of trajectory correction for March 2020 are scheduled for September 30, Dec. 18. February 10 and February 16. That will set the stage for the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars on 18 February.
China’s Tianwen 1 mission completed its first course correction after its launch on August 1 (GMT), according to the state-run Chinese News Agency.
The spaceship fired its main engine for 20 seconds in the first of several maneuvers planned during the trip to Mars. The maneuver also served as a test of the probe’s main engine, which performed well during the fire, Chinese officials said.
Tianwen 1 launched July 23 aboard a heavy lift Long March 5 rocket. The ambitious mission will be China’s first to reach Mars, and includes an orbiter, lander and rover.
The spacecraft is scheduled to orbit Mars in February – with a long engine fire – and the orbiter will explore candidate landing sites for two to three months before releasing the lander and rover to enter the Martian atmosphere.
If China abandons those plans according to plan, it will make China the third country to make a soft landing on Mars – after the Soviet Union and the United States – and the second country to ride a robot rover on the Red Planet.
NASA has so far landed the only successful rovers on Mars.
UAE Hurricane Hope Mars has also successfully completed its first interplanetary course correction maneuver, mission officials announced on August 17.
In a tweet, officials described the event as an ‘important milestone’ on the journey to Mars. It was the first fire from the six largest launchers of the probe since the launch of the orbiter on July 19 on top of a Japanese H-2A rocket.
Like NASA’s NAS 2020 mission and China’s Tianwen 1 spacecraft, the UAE’s Hope orbiter will arrive on Mars in February.
Funded and led by the United Arab Emirates – and developed in collaboration with American scientists – the Hope Mars probe has a digital camera to measure the Martian surface, dust storms and ice clouds, and spectrometers to measure components at multiple levels of the atmosphere of the planet.
The Hope mission is the first interplanetary probe of the Arab world.
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