Summer will be busy for missions to the planet Mars. The summer period 2020 is indeed an ideal shooting window due to the proximity of Earth and Mars but it is a short opportunity (July-August) which, if it is missed, leads to a postponement to 2022.
This is what happened for the Russian-European mission ExoMars 2020 which has been shifted to the next Earth-Mars rapprochement in two years. On the NASA side, the mission Mars 2020, which will aim to install a new rover Perseverance on Martian soil, is maintained but is postponed for a few weeks.
Scheduled for July 17, it had experienced a first postponement to July 22 but it will not take off in the end not before July 30 at best, the time to check certain sensor anomalies observed during the test filling of the Atlas 5 launcher.
The window officially closing on August 11, the NASA mission will not be able to afford a lot of additional postponements, even if an extension until August 15 remains possible, with a very short time window.
March 2020 project manager Matt Wallace says he is confident of a launch within the planned period, especially since a postponement of the mission to 2022 would entail an additional cost of some $ 500 million.
If the timing is respected, the Perseverance rover arises in mid-February 2021 in the Jezero crater and will start looking for signs of past life while retrieving soil samples which must be able to be sent back to Earth as part of another mission planned for the moment in 2026.
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