Starting in July, the window opens when missions to Mars can be easily dispatched across the interplanetary gulf. If all goes well, three of those missions, ridden by NASA, China, and the United Arab Emirates, will leave Earth for the Red Planet. The number of missions, who is launching them and their complexity illustrate the importance Mars has for providers of space exploration policy.
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Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars, is displayed from ESA’s Mars Express
NASA Perseverance is currently slated to launch somewhere between July 30 and August 15. It will land in Jezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. Perseverance will roll through the Martian landscape in search of signs of life – past and present – and collecting rocks and soil samples for later collection and delivery to Earth. The rover will also carry a helicopter drone that is anticipated to be the first aircraft to fly in the skies of another world.
China’s Tianwen-1 is the most complex, consisting of an orbiter, a lander, and a scout vehicle. The name roughly translates to “the search for heavenly truth.” The rover is much smaller than Perseverance and contains six scientific instruments. While the rover spends 90 Martian days studying Mars at close range, the orbiter will examine it from a broader perspective for about a Martian year, serving as a communication transmitter.
The United Arab Emirates mission is a small orbiter named Hope. Hope will launch on a Japanese rocket and spend 200 days sailing to Mars. The probe will enter an elliptical orbit around the red planet. Hope will spend at least two years studying aspects of the Martian atmosphere.
Why are so many missions being sent to Mars in a single month? The answer is different for each player.
NASA’s primary mandate since its inception has been to explore space. The space agency has been sending robot probes to Mars since Mariner 4 in the mid-1960s. NASA also has a renewed mandate to send astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to Mars, as well as to other destinations. Every robotic probe that flies, orbits, or lands on Mars is a prelude to the day when Americans step out of the Mars lander and step on the face of a second alien world. The human expedition to Mars, stopping on the moon to complete the rocket fuel created by lunar water, will be a unique historical event of this century, dwarfing the Apollo moon landing.
China is organizing an expedition to Mars to improve its status as a great space power. Beijing envisions its space program, which includes a planned manned space station and various robotic expeditions to the moon leading to a manned landing, as a means of defining itself as a superpower, first as a pair of the United States, but long-term for impersonate America.
The UAE, aware that oil and gas are beginning to lose their appeal, have embarked on creating a high-tech economy. The Hope mission, the first of its kind in any Arab nation, is part of that strategy.
Every bit of data collected by these missions, as well as all past and future, will support the greatest vision of Mars of all. SpaceX’s Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to found a city on the Red Planet, thus establishing, as space visionary Robert Zubrin has argued, a second branch of human civilization. The idea is to awaken the pioneering spirit on Earth by opening a human frontier on the fourth planet from the sun, allowing for the innovation and optimism that has been lacking in recent years. Coincidentally, Mars would become an insurance policy for the human race, ensuring that it does not become extinct due to some calamity, such as the object that crashed into Earth, killing dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
The final dream is to use terraforming techniques to transform Mars into a habitable world, one of oceans and forests and an atmosphere that humans can breathe. Terraforming the red planet into a blue world would be the work of centuries. The process would restore Mars to what it was billions of years ago, before a slow-motion calamity created the arid and cold planet we know today.
Musk’s dream, to be fulfilled, would be as consistent as the emergence of life from ocean to land. It would constitute the evolution of humanity on a species of multiple planets.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study on space exploration entitled Why is it so difficult to return to the moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. Blog at Curmudgeons Corner. It is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other places.
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