Perserverance has landed on Mars.These are all the missions of 2021

The Perseverance rover landed on Mars in search of traces of organic carbon.It is the third mission in a year to the red planet.

Last update:Thursday 18 February, 10.30pm

On February 18, just before 9.55 pm (Italian time), the rover Perseverance of the mission Mars 2020 of NASA he landed on Mars, the red planet, after a journey of 203 days and 472 million kilometres.Having descended at around 1,500 km/h, once the heat shield was abandoned and the parachute opened, it touched the ground in less than two minutes, successfully.A few minutes later it sent the first two images of Mars to mission control.“This landing is one of the pivotal moments for NASA, the United States and global space exploration,” said NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk.The rover will now undergo several weeks of testing before starting its two-year scientific investigation on the Jezero crater.

The rover is programmed to search for traces of organic life passed and in the collection of rock samples which can be recovered in the future from other missions.With him, safe in the lower part of Perseverance, there is also a small helicopter-drone – Ingenuity – which will serve to test the possibilities of flight in the Martian atmosphere for the first time.The arrival of the probe which left 6 months ago (30 July 2020) seals the year of Mars, after the success of the United Arab Emirates missions with Hope, and the Chinese one with the Tianwen-1 probe.

The Mars 2020 program and the Mars sample return

There mission, lasting approximately at least one Martian year (i.e. 687 Earth days), will see the rover engaged in searching for rocks that have formed or been altered by environments that could have support microbial life in Mars' ancient past, as well as rocks they may have preserved chemical traces of organic life, the so-called “biosignatures”.It will also verify the possibility of producing oxygen from CO2 Martian, as a possible support for future human missions, as well as the identification of other resources, such as water underground.

Finally, moving on Martian soil, it will drill and collect at least 30 rock and regolith samples – the layer of sediments that covers the surface – encapsulating them and memorizing their position, so that the samples can be recovered from future missions, in particular from the Mars sample return to which NASA and Hex they are already working.

This is a very important mission for the study of the red planet and which paves the way for future human expeditions to Mars.In fact, they are almost gone 20 years since the first rovers (Spirit in 2003 and Opportunity in 2004), which gave us confirmation of the past presence of water on the planet.Which leads us to suppose that there may also have been organic life, as we know it, based on carbon.

Even the United Arab Emirates on Mars with the Hope probe

The last February 10th instead, the Emirati Hope probe entered Martian orbit, first successful launch of the Arab country.In the next three months Al Amal (hope in Arabic) will settle into a stable orbit that will allow it to scan and photograph the red planet.Last February 17, the probe sent its first image of Mars to mission control.

The main objective, as he writes Rainews24, remains that of monitor Martian meteorology and climatology with three scientific instruments:Emirs (Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer), an infrared spectrometer designed for the study of energy exchanges that occur in the lower atmosphere and that drive its global dynamics;Exi (Emirates Exploration Imager), a high resolution camera that will work at visible and ultraviolet frequencies and which will be able to obtain detail on the surface up to 8 kilometers and Emus (Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer), an ultraviolet spectrometer for the study of chemical species in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

China's Tianwen-1 will bring another rover

The sky and surroundings of Mars certainly remain crowded, given that 24 hours after Hope's arrival, so does the Chinese Tianwen-1 it managed to successfully insert itself into orbit.Having started a week before the American "competitor", this mission also has the objective of study the Martian atmosphere and the surface of the planet, obviously looking for "biosignatures" or the presence of water, already confirmed at the poles.The probe is equipped with a rover, the first in China and the only one after the American missions, which should land on Martian soil in May this year.This would be a success for China, after the Yinghuo-1 probe, launched in 2011, was lost with the failure of the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, which failed to enter orbit and then returned to the Pacific in January 2012.

These are only the first but decisive steps ofexploration of Mars, now increasingly active and in which numerous countries participate, from India to the United States, from Russia to Europe, passing through China.The mission is in fact scheduled for 2022 ExoMars coordinated by ESA in collaboration with Roscosmos Space Corporation, with the goal of determining whether there ever was life and better understand the history of water on the planet.A race to the red planet therefore, which definitively paves the way for the arrival of the first man on red soil.