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China’s Tianwen-1 mission is even more ambitious, comprising an orbiter, a lander and a rover. Taking its name from Tianwen (The Heavenly Questions), an epic poem written more than 2,200 years ago by Qu Yuan, the orbiting spacecraft will include a high-resolution camera, ground-penetrating radar, a spectrometer, a magnetometer and several particle analyzers, with the aim of teasing out more information about the surface, subsurface and atmosphere.
The unnamed rover – China recently announced a global campaign to give it a name – will roll off the lander in a region of Mars called Utopia Planetia, where scientists believe there is a subsurface reservoir of ice containing as much water as Lake Superior. It too will carry cameras and radar as well as weather monitoring equipment. The rover is expected to function for 90 days, but previous vehicles have performed better than projected, in part because occasional wind storms serve to blow dust off the solar panels.
Then there’s NASA’s newest mission, scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on July 30 at 7:50 a.m. ET. (The launch window extends until mid-August.) Hitching a ride on the bottom of the rover Perseverance is a miniature helicopter called Ingenuity. Weighing in at just 1.8 kg (or less than 700 grams in the lower gravity of Mars), Ingenuity aims to be the first aircraft to fly on another planet.
Perseverance looks a lot like Curiosity but carries a new range of instruments, including additional cameras and the ability to cache rock samples for eventual return to Earth on a future mission, tentatively planned for a 2026 liftoff. Orbital mechanics mean that an ideal launch window for Mars opens once every 26 months, which is why so many ships are leaving at the same time.
In the meantime, Russia is planning a 2022 launch of ExoMars. The mission was originally scheduled for launch this year until problems with parachutes and electronics convinced scientists to perform additional tests.
The 2026 mission will include an orbiter, another lander with a small rocket that can return the samples to earth, and another rover to make the transfer of samples. Mars may be some time away from human visitors, but its robot population continues to swell.
