With their probe “Al-Amal” (“hope” in French), the United Arab Emirates must open the dance Thursday July 16 at 20 h 43 GMT, taking off from the Japanese space center of Tanegashima.
The UAE probe is closely followed by the Chinese mission Tianwen-1 (“questions in heaven”), which will leave from the tropical island of Hainan, in the south of China, between July 20 and 25. The Americans plan on July 30 to launch their “Perseverance” rover, a more sophisticated probe.
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Missions Are Not Equal
The three competitors leave at the same time, but the missions are not equal. The size of a large car, the 1,350-kg UAE probe will remain in orbit 687 days, or a Martian year, before returning to Earth. Its goal ? Analyze the atmospheric evolutions of Mars. China, for its part, lands on Martian soil.
After a bitter failure in 2011, it has caught up: Tianwen-1 includes a probe, as well as a small remote-controlled robot. With 6 wheels and two solar panels, it should be operational for three months on the surface of Mars to analyze the soil.
The most ambitious, however, remain the Americans. Always bigger, always heavier, their Perseverance rover weighs a ton, and is three meters long. Equipped with cameras, lasers, microphones, and robotic arms, he goes hunting for microbes. The challenge is to detect traces of bacteria or microbes that may have lived on Mars almost 3.5 billion years ago.
On this giant, there is a French technology: the Supercam, which measures the chemical composition of rocks by shooting at them with a laser. ” It is a major instrument, not only for the Mars 2020 mission, but also for the strategies and the choice of places for taking samples intended to be brought back to earth around the 2030s. “Explains Michel Viso, Exobiology manager at CNES
First scientific issues
If the countries are rushing, it is because the shooting window is short. Earth and Mars revolve around the sun in two separate orbits, at different speeds: it is a question of leaving when the two planets are closer to each other (54 million km).
Scientists are also looking for a configuration that allows the trip to be done in a minimum of time and energy. The conditions are met from July 15 to 30, and missing this opportunity requires a postponement of about 26 months. This is the fate of the European mission ExoMars 2020, postponed for the third time to August 2022.
Why are we so interested in the planet Mars? The stakes are first of all scientific. ” 3.5 million years ago, Mars had an atmosphere and water: it could have been conducive to the development of a form of life. But unlike Earth, it has not experienced plate tectonics, which makes it the most accessible place to search for what may have happened in the very distant past on nearby cousin planets. “Continues Michel Viso. ” We are finally trying to answer questions very focused on humanity: where do we come from? How could life have emerged? »
A human colony on Mars
This race for space is also a political instrument; it is a question of proving the scientific and technological power of the country. ” The Emirates wanted to send a strong message to the Arab youth, and remind them of the past, that we were once the generators of knowledge Explains Omran Charaf, project manager.
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Al Amal to arrive in orbit in February, in time for 50e anniversary of the unification of the Emirates. The country aims for a human colony on Mars by 2117, and wants to create a “scientific city” in the desert, in which it would reproduce the conditions that one could find on Mars.
A human colony on Mars is actually a dream: could the planet become a new refuge for humans? For Michel Viso, this is out of the question: “Mars is not a plan B. There is only one spacecraft for the human species, it is planet Earth. We can explore, but it is criminal to suggest that we will one day be able to leave it and move elsewhere ”.
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