Very intense traffic these days on the sky of Mars. On February 9, the Al Amal probe, Speranza, launched by the United Arab Emirates, enters the orbit of the planet. The next day the Chinese arrive with the Tiānwèn-1 probe, which means “Questions to the sky”. Finally, on the 18th, the Americans will arrive with the Perseverance rover: by dint of trying (they already have four rovers on the planet) they want to find some bacteria that can be defined as a form of life.
The Emirates, the first Arab country in space, did everything only thanks to the money: their probe was built in the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics of the University of Colorado, the rocket that started it is Japanese and the journey is went perfectly. They want to study the atmosphere of Mars and find out why it was almost all wiped out in the distant past. The Chinese have more ambitious goals: the orbiter will fly over the planet for a few months and then launch a lander and a rover with instruments that will search for water and life forms. What the Chinese and Arabs are doing today, NASA has been doing it since the 1960s with the first shipments of the Mariner and therefore it is not surprising that the arrival of the latest NASA probe, scheduled for February 18, will be much more spectacular and interesting.
The Mars 2020 mission plans to bring the Perseverance rover, which alone weighs more than a ton, equipped with a drone-helicopter called Ingenuity, which means ingenuity, to the planet. It will be worthwhile to follow the last stages of the descent online from NASA, those “seven minutes of terror” in which everything will be decided without the possibility for the Earth control center to intervene in case of problems. Radio signals from Mars take 13 minutes to get to Houston and another 13 to go back. If the probe screams “help,” it will crash to the ground before anyone can intervene.
Something is very likely to go wrong, as evidenced by the large number of past failures in expeditions to Mars. After a journey of 470 million kilometers covered in six months, Mars 2020 will come close to the planet at the speed of 20,000 kilometers per hour and when it enters the Martian upper atmosphere it will slow down to 1,600. At that point it will open the sturdy supersonic parachute that will slow it down to 320 kilometers per hour, still too many to land. Eight braking rockets pointing downwards will then ignite and when the rover is 20 meters high, some of the lander’s nylon cables will gently lay it on the ground as a crane would do on a construction site. Soon after, sharp blades activated by an explosive charge will sever the cables and many people at NASA will be able to breathe a sigh of relief. The whole sequence is visible in an animation on Youtube, and it really is a sight.
Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater, which is supposed to have been a lake thousands of years ago. If even a few amoeba swam in it, he must have left a trace. The probe will collect soil samples with the aim of sending them back to Earth in a future and no better clear mission, already baptized Mars Sample Return. When it finds the right terrain, that is to say a flat area free of natural obstacles, Perseverance will also free the Ingenuity drone, which will collect more data and especially tell us if it is possible to fly easily to Mars despite the thin atmosphere.
Chinese and Arabs will observe everything from above, with their probes in orbit. The success or failure of the American mission will also be decisive in deciding the policy of the new president Joe Biden, it is not known how interested in spending the few funds available for space companies. But in China, Russia and India the space race is also managed by the military and falling behind today does not only mean making a bad impression: it could also be very dangerous for future equilibrium, on Earth and in space.
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