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).
Three countries are ready to launch.
The United Arab Emirates will open the ball on July 15 by sending the first interplanetary Arab 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 mobile robot, marking the start of a pharaonic program never before carried out of sampling, in view of 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 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Mars
Photo : iStock
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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 will crescendo, and Mars has become the priority of space exploration.
It 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
, explains to AFP Michel Viso, exobiologist at CNES, the French space agency that designed one of the main instruments of the NASA Perseverance robot.
We feel that something exciting is approaching, and that we have to be!
The new space race
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 one seeks to Score points in this quest, to assert yourself as a scientific and spatial power.
With another dream in mind, more distant: that ofans “,” text “:” contribute to the adventure of human exploration on Mars, which represents the ultimate frontier where man can go, in 20, 30 or 40 years “}}” lang = “fr “>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, building a City of Sciences
reproducing the environmental conditions of Mars for the establishment of a human colony by … 2117.
The Curiosity mission aims to demonstrate the habitability of the planet Mars.
Photo: NASA
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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 is, nor that allows to transform it into a Terre up
.
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 [avec une atmosphère dense, de l’eau liquide].
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 NASA Curiosity currently does.
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 10 years.
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