Three spaceships are headed to Mars, including one containing a U.S. rover and a helicopter that will search for signs of past life on the Red Planet. SpaceX just successfully brought home two astronauts from the International Space Station in a reusable capsule that splashed down on Sunday. And Earthlings soon will be able to get internet service via hundreds of satellites, also compliments of SpaceX.
It’s a profound moment, indeed, marking a new era for space travel, even if the summer of 2020 is better remembered for the COVID-19 pandemic.
The United States continues to lead in space exploration, as it has since NASA first put men on the moon in 1969, but it is not alone. China also has a Mars-bound spaceship carrying a lander, rover and orbiter, and United Arab Emirates has an orbiter on its way. Each will be making a roughly 300-million-mile journey at a cruising speed around 24,600 mph, arriving at Mars in February.
What’s also remarkable is that private industry is doing much of the heavy lifting as well as the scientific experimentation. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule represents a rejuvenation of our crewed spaceflight program and a deeper participation of private companies in that effort, a welcome development that could make more space exploration possible and financially feasible.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is probably the most recognizable player in the private sector. But dozens of other companies and a few universities also are getting into the space market. The UAE spacecraft was designed by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, with help from Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley. It was launched on a Japanese-made rocket.
The Chinese government, however, has retained tight control over its Mars program, though it has been working closely with Russia on its current mission since 2011. Its objective also is to find signs of life. The Chinese rover will explore a plain in Mars’ northern hemisphere near where NASA’s Viking 2 lander touched down.
The U.S. plutonium-powered rover, Perseverance, will land farther south near Jezero crater, believed to have been a lake about 3.8 billion years ago. The car-size rover is equipped with mechanical arms and a drill to gather core samples that are expected to be returned to Earth by 2031 in a future mission. That would be a first. The rover also will be carrying a drone-size helicopter, which is expected to take a test flight in the spring. Another first.
Is there life on Mars? Has there ever been? And is the planet capable of supporting human life? Those are some of the $2.7 billion questions NASA hopes to answer.
The mission, NASA’s ninth to Mars, also will test out a method of producing oxygen from the carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere. That will be important for sustaining human life on Mars and possibly making a propellant for launching rockets from the surface.
Think about it: a 300-million-mile arc through space. That’s more than 1,250 times farther than the moon from the Earth. Now, NASA is working toward landing astronauts on the Red Planet as soon as 2033. That doesn’t seem so far away anymore.
