NASA, China and the UAE are scheduled to send missions to Mars in July

[left-of-center2012]

Source: The Hill

Starting in July the window opens when missions to Mars can be easily sent across the interplanetary gulf. If all goes well, three such missions, mounted by NASA, China and the United Arab Emirates, will depart Earth for the Red Planet. The number of missions, who is launching them and their complexity illustrate the importance Mars has for purveyors of space exploration policy.

NASA Perseverance is currently scheduled to launch somewhere between July 30 and August 15. It will land in the Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. Perseverance will roll about the Martian landscape looking for signs of life — past and present — and collecting rock and soil samples for later pickup and delivery to Earth. The rover will also carry a helicopter drone that is envisioned as the first aircraft to fly in the skies of another world.

China’s Tianwen-1 is the most complex, consisting of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. The name translates roughly to “the quest for heavenly truth.” The rover is much smaller than Perseverance and contains six scientific instruments. While the rover spends 90 Martian days rolling about studying Mars at close range, the orbiter will examine it from a wider perspective for about a Martian year, serving as a communication relay.

The United Arab Emirates mission is a small orbiter called Hope. Hope is scheduled to launch on a Japanese rocket and will spend 200 days cruising to Mars. The probe will enter an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet. Hope will spend at least two years studying aspects of the Martian atmosphere.

Read more: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/505922-nasa-china-and-the-uae-are-scheduled-to-send-missions-to-mars-in-july

---

Every iota of data gleaned by these missions, as well as everyone past and future, will support the grandest Mars vision of all. SpaceX’s Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to found a city on the Red Planet, thus establishing, as the space visionary Robert Zubrin has advocated, a second branch of human civilization. The idea is to spark the pioneering spirit on Earth by opening a human frontier on the fourth planet from the sun, enabling innovation and optimism that has been sorely lacking in recent years. Coincidentally, Mars would become an insurance policy for the human race, ensuring that it does not become extinct due to some calamity, such as the object that crashed into the Earth, killing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

[soothsayer]

1. Does the UAE "hope" there's oil there?

[Sapient Donkey]

2. Interesting to hear about United Arab Emirates space program

This is the first time I ever heard mention of it.

[yaesu]

3. Nasa is just a corporate welfare tool now, not interested in this space cowboy crap

billionaire game room.

[Progressive Jones]

4. I guess this is why we need SPACEFORCE !!! nt

[oasis]

5. Because humanity cannot survive without trips to Mars.

[Joel Eyeforth]

6. Stop looking for Life on Mars!

We've spent all this time and money looking for. . .microbes. Or fossilized microbes. Think how further along we'd be right now had we invested those resources into practical exploration---for minerals, green energy sources, ways to repair our damaged ecosystem---instead of trying to assuage our collective loneliness? This is why I approve of Musk's approach: Just get our asses there, and whatever we find, we find!

[localroger]

7. If we had never put a lander on mars, we would be...

...exactly where we are now, because in the overall picture of our total society, space exploration is a rounding error. But because we spent that sliver of our GDP pursuing knowledge we actually know that Venus isn't a double-Earth paradise, that Mars is actually an inhospitable desert but that it might also have been an Eden when Earth was still molten from the fires of its formation, we know that the Moon was created in a collision between a Mars-sized protoworld and the forming Earth in the late stages of Earth's formation. We know that the atmospheres of the outer gas planets are insanely active and that there are far more asteroids zipping around the solar system than we ever guessed. We know because of one experiment, LIGO, that most of the elements heavier than iron in the universe were probably created in collisions between neutron stars. This is all stuff we didn't know when I was a child in the 1970's. Is it "useful?" I dunno, is electricity "useful?" There was a time when it would have seemed as much a waste of time as Mars exploration does today. But knowledge is never useless, and the resources we spend on space are just a tiny fraction of what we have available. What we waste sating the greed of feckless assholes is far greater.

[Joel Eyeforth]

8. Whoa!

Did I say I was against the space program? I can unequivocally assure you, my friend, that I am not! I've been a huge supporter of space exploration, both humanned and unhumanned. The knowledge we have gleaned about our solar system (and others!), as well as Earth itself, is worth a thousand times the money we've expended! And let's face it, without Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Mariner, Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizens, etc., we almost certainly not be having this conversation, as the technological advances to our everyday lives over the past seven decades would be impossible without the space program!

What I am objecting to is the obsession that has possessed NASA and OTHER COUNTRIES' SPACE AGENCIES to find the merest speck of life outside our own exosphere. I totally supporting the Viking landers, plus a couple of followups looking for biology. But come on, it's been done to death! There's no life on Mars! And, if there ever was, it was not advanced. Our focus nor should change to practical matters regarding homo sapiens and our possibilities there.

And by all means, keep sending probes to other places: an American Venus Lander! Further landers on Titan! A flyby of Eris and Makemake! And of course, humanned bases on the Moon, a body where we can mine, drill and manufacture with no environmental issues! Plus using it as the launch platform to get US to Mars and beyond!

You & I, my friend, have far fewer differences than you may think.

[localroger]

10. Thank you for clarifying, you are right.

The particular emphasis on life on Mars goes to more of a philosophical challenge, of whether there is life anywhere else at all. There is a strong feeling in a lot of circles that there probably is or was life on Mars, and even possibly that life on Earth is descended from it because Martian life could have gotten to a level while Earth was still molten that a meteor could have knocked a couple of rocks off to carry that life to Earth once Earth was capable of hosting life. Which wouldn't really be a major scientific thing, but would really put a big hole in a lot of religious beliefs.

It is only with Curiosity that we have become fairly sure that Mars once had large bodies of water on its surface. And that is a sword that cuts two ways -- if Mars once had oceans and now doesn't, is there any chance Earth might enter a Mars or Venus like endgame? Things aren't nearly as steady in these regards as we have tended to assume for the last few hundred years. Planets are not created by God with fiat characteristics which are guaranteed to prevail for eternity. And if Mars once had a biosphere, we might want to pay more attention to what we are doing to ours now.

[MasonDreams]

9. Absolutely, we need to get out to Mars! Send an assassin to kill Marvin before he blows up Earth.