This year, for a few weeks, Mars and Earth will be aligned. The distance between the two will be the minimum —barely 54 million kilometers—, something that will not happen again until 2022. That is why in 2020 an unprecedented event occurs since the end of the Cold War: the launch of four robotic missions to this planet , three of them led by the main space powers, the US, Europe and China, which intend to successfully land their own exploration vehicles with the intention of being the first to find signs of life.
“This is something never seen before,” explains Ken Farley, chief scientist of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, who points out that to the projects mentioned we must add the orbiter recently launched by India and the “growing enthusiasm” of companies private companies like Space X to get to this planet.
Mars is a huge graveyard of crashed ships. One out of every two space missions trying to reach it fails. Landing on Mars requires a devilish maneuver to slow down from the 21,000 kilometers per hour at which the ship reaches zero in just seven minutes, with little help from the Martian atmosphere, much thinner than Earth’s, and at the mercy of the weather that day do on this inhospitable planet where it is not uncommon to reach temperatures of 100 degrees below zero.
In 2016, the ship ExoMars was hit by a violent gust of wind aloft. The ship swung like a huge pendulum, for she still had her parachute strapped on and her altitude sensors suddenly pointed to the horizon instead of the surface. The on-board computer interpreted that the ship had landed, shut down the retrorockets prematurely and ExoMars crashed into the icy Martian soil.
That mission was a demonstrator of the landing technology that he must now use ExoMars 2020, the mission of the European Space Agency homologous to the American one. Those responsible for the European mission do not see the accident as a failure and believe they have learned and solved the problem.
The three missions mentioned plus the fourth, the orbiter Hope from the United Arab Emirates, developed thanks to the collaboration of US scientists, have very similar launch windows starting in mid-July and ending in mid-August. They will take seven months to reach the red planet, so the landings are scheduled for February 2021.
“Our main goal is to search for traces of life on Mars from more than 3.5 billion years ago, when liquid water covered much of the planet,” explains Ken Farley. NASA’s mission is going to land at the bottom of an ancient lake several hundred meters deep called Jezero Crater. “In a place like this, microbes like those on Earth could have lived without problems,” highlights this geochemistry expert from the California Institute of Technology.
Another US goal is to pave the way to send astronauts to the red planet. At this point, Spain has an important role, as it leads the MEDA instrument, the meteorological station on board the exploration vehicle that measures temperature, wind, dust particles and radiation and which will serve to estimate the habitability of the planet for future astronauts. Another of the instruments is an oxygen detector, a key element to make the Martian air breathable and to build fuel for the rockets that take off from the Martian soil towards Earth in the future.
“The most novel thing about the American and European missions is that they carry a new generation of Raman spectrometers that are capable of detecting biomarkers at a distance,” explains Jorge Pla-García, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, who is participating in the American mission. and has collaborated with the European. These are chemical compounds that may be due to the presence of current or past life. At this point, Europe may have an advantage, acknowledges Pla-García, since his vehicle is the only one that carries a drill that penetrates up to two meters into the Martian soil. “This is the most feasible place for something alive to exist, because on the surface everything is fried not only by radiation, but also by the abundance of salts with chlorine, which is the material that we use on Earth to kill microbes,” he explains. the investigator.
China, the third Martian passenger, has never managed to travel there before. The space progress of the communist country has been overwhelming and has demonstrated its ability to achieve things that had never been achieved before, such as posing a rover on the dark side of the Moon. Its Huoxing-1 mission to Mars includes an orbital module, a lander and a small rover whose main asset is a powerful radar capable of penetrating the Martian subsoil to reveal its composition and which, on the Moon, allowed the discovery of an ancient ocean of lava. “If it were any other country, I would think that they would not be capable, but I believe anything about China. You just have to think that in 2019, for the second year in a row, they are the country that has carried out the most space launches in the world”, highlights Pla-García.
In the minds of the three countries is the idea of bringing a little piece of Mars to Earth. The rover American carries an instrument that will be able to encapsulate the most interesting samples and preserve them so that a future mission yet to be detailed can collect them and bring them back to Earth. Both the US and China want to try it before the end of the decade and Europe and the US are already collaborating on a mission of this type that would be launched in 2026, explains Ken Farley. Everyone is aware that the first known Martians can travel in these samples.