Earth attacks! Army of spacecraft heading off to Mars

China, the US and the UAE are using a ‘launch window’ in which the Red Planet is close to continue the hunt for life.

A satellite model at Dubai’s space centre. Picture: AFP

The roads may still be quiet down here on a COVID-hit Earth but outer space seems headed for an interplanetary traffic jam as a string of missions take off for Mars over the next few weeks.

The Red Planet will be the busiest it has ever been as the world’s two biggest powers — and one tiny one — set off on a new quest to discover whether there has ever been life on Mars.

A planned fourth launch, a joint EU-Russian project, has been postponed until 2022.

The reason for the rush is a rare “launch window” in which the distances between the orbits of Earth and Mars are close and set to narrow to a mere 62,120,678km in October.

This means the journey takes just six or seven months.

The first to launch on Tuesday is the Arab world’s first space mission — the Hope probe of the United Arab Emirates — a country that six years ago did not even have a space program. Not content with building the world’s tall­est tower and ski slopes in the desert, as well as flexing its international muscle with troops in Yemen and airstrikes in Libya, the tiny sheikhdom is investing billions to shoot for the stars.

The UAE has been space-mad since its first astronaut went into orbit last year.

Hazza al-Mansouri, 36, spent eight days on the International Space Station. His reports back so gripped the nation that he was mobbed on his return. It is also providing an unexpected role model for schoolgirls: 40 per cent of its space team is female.

Weather conditions permitting, the unmanned UAE probe will lift off from the Japanese island of Tanegashima and arrive in February 2021 to coincide with the UAE’s golden jubilee. It will then orbit for a Martian year of 687 days and aims to produce the first global map of the Martian atmosphere. It ultimately plans to build a city — the Mars 2117 Project announced by Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai.

The week after the Hope take-off will see the launch of the first solely Chinese mission to Mars, the Tianwen-1 or Heavenly Questions probe. The Long March 5 rocket is scheduled to take off from Wenchang on Hainan island on July 23 and aims to arrive next February, when it will drop an orbiter, lander and solar-­powered rover on Mars, a triple that no other nation has achieved.

Last but not least is Nasa’s Perseverance mission, which takes off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on July 30 or soon after, and plans to land a rover in the Jezero crater. Another US rover, Curiosity, is already there. Perseverance is expected to spend one Mars year collecting rock and soil samples that scientists hope will shed light on past life forms that may have inhabited the planet.

Mars has long intrigued scientists because of evidence of water in the past, suggesting it could have sustained microbial life.

There have been 56 missions to the Red Planet since the 1960s, of which fewer than half have been successful. The British lander Beagle 2 crashed in 2003.

Of 12 Mars landing attempts, eight — all by NASA — led to successful surface missions.

“It’s the only planet where we’ve been able to detect past signs of (the possibility of) life, and the more we learn about it, the more hope there is,” said Michel Viso, an astrobiologist at CNES, France’s space agency.

“It feels like something exciting is happening.”

Several wealthy entrepreneurs have also entered into the arena of colonising Mars.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Space-X, launched US astronauts into space in May and plans to establish a colony of a million people there by 2050.

It’s an extreme way to escape COVID-19, but in the absence of a vaccine, and with cruises off the agenda for the moment, he may find some takers.

THE SUNDAY TIMES