On February 18 at approximately 20:55 GMT, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover is expected to touch down on the Red Planet. The mission, which was launched seven months ago, has been travelling for nearly half a billion kilometres at more than fifteen times the speed of a bullet.
Equipped with 19 cameras and two microphones, the mission will be streamed on NASA’s YouTube page starting at 19:15 GMT. If the mission is successful, a few days later we will all be able to watch HD footage of the touchdown on Mars, which is more than 200 million kilometres away, from the comfort of our homes.
Missions to Mars
Perseverance is one of three separate missions arriving at Mars this month. On February 9, the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to send a probe around Mars to study its atmosphere. The next day, China’s Tianwen-1 mission completed its first successful journey to another planet in our solar system. The orbiter will spend a few months analysing the surface of the planet before deploying the first non-American rover on Mars, which is scheduled for May or June 2021.
The reason why these missions are back-to-back has to do with orbit trajectories. Every two years, the orbits of Mars and Earth come closer together, giving scientists a launch window that minimises cost, time and energy.
Humans have attempted to reach Mars since the 1960s. Since then, at least nine nations have attempted 49 missions to Mars which include orbiters (fly around the planet), landers (remain stationary on the Martian surface) and rovers (move around the surface).
