Several robotic exploration missions to Mars will begin this summer, when the red planet is very close to Earth.
This summer, Earthlings have a new big date with Mars: three exploration missions will fly to the red planet, the ultimate frontier for humanity which fuels the hope, more and more credible, of detect signs of a past life there and, in the future, set foot there.
The cycle of celestial mechanics offers only one window of fire every 26 months, the distance between Mars and Earth being at this period shorter than usual, which makes the journey easier (55 million kilometers , about six months of travel all the same).
Three countries are in the starting blocks. The United Arab Emirates will open the ball on July 15 by sending the first Arab interplanetary probe in history, “Al-Amal” (“Hope”), to study the atmosphere of the planet. China will follow, which will also make its Martian baptism with “Tianwen” (“Questions in heaven”), by sending a probe and a small remote-controlled robot, between July 20 and 25.
The most ambitious, the American “Mars 2020”, will set off on July 30 to land a vehicle designed to explore its surface, the Perseverance rover, marking the start of a pharaonic program never before carried out of sampling, for their return to Earth. A key step in the quest for the living.
A fourth Russian-European escape was planned, “ExoMars” and its drilling robot, but had to be postponed to 2022 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
This rush to the red planet is not new: a real scientific nugget, our closest neighbor has hosted since the 1960s several dozen automatic probes, most of them American, in orbit or on the ground, many of which have failed.
But since the 2000s and the discovery proving that liquid water had flowed on the surface, the attraction is increasing, and Mars has become the priority of space exploration.
“This is the only planet where we have the chance to detect a form of past life, and the more we accumulate knowledge, the more the place is promising. We feel that something exciting is approaching, and that you have to be! “, explains to AFP Michel Viso, exobiologist at CNES, the French space agency that designed one of the main instruments of the NASA Perseverance rover.
The United States, Europe, India, China, the Emirates, and in 2024 Japan which will send a probe to explore Phobos, one of the moons of Mars … as with the Moon, each seeks to mark points in this quest, to assert itself as a scientific and spatial power.
With another dream in mind, more distant: that of “contribute to the adventure of human exploration on Mars, which represents the ultimate frontier where man can go, in 20, 30 or 40 years”, analyzes Michel Viso.
The objective of a manned flight on Mars is for the moment seriously envisaged only in the United States, the only ones to have launched detailed studies on the feasibility of such an adventure. But which other nations could join.
The Emirates are considering, for example, the construction of a “City of Sciences” reproducing the environmental conditions of Mars with a view to establishing a human colony by … 2117.
Today the planet is nothing but a huge frozen desert, which has slowly lost its dense atmosphere after a gigantic climate change, around 3.5 billion years ago, and is no longer protected from cosmic radiation. In short, nothing that makes it “habitable” as it is, or that allows it to be transformed into a “Land bis”.
But the question is first to know if it was inhabited in the past, when the conditions for a metabolic life (microbes for example) were met.
“Four billion years ago, the conditions on the surface were very close to what was on Earth at the time when life appeared”, with a dense atmosphere, liquid water, notes Jorge Vago, scientific manager of ExoMars at the European Space Agency (ESA).
So why is there life on Earth and, a priori, more on Mars – if there has been? This is the question that the various robots that have crisscrossed the surface are trying to answer, as Curiosity by NASA is currently doing.
Perseverance will complete the quest for the famous robot, by landing in an unexplored environment, the Jezero crater, rich in sedimentary rocks and which shelters a delta-shaped relief attributed to the mouth of an ancient river flowing into a lake. : the ideal site for trapping traces of a past life – of which liquid water and carbon are the two presuppositions.
March 2020 must take around forty relevant samples, of which around thirty will return to Earth: this return will be the subject of an extremely complex mission in several stages, with in particular a new take-off. It should make it possible to analyze these exotic fragments with high performance terrestrial instruments. But be patient: not before ten years.
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