At the beginning of his report, the reporter points out that there were two other spacecraft that carried out space flights from Earth to Mars during the past time when the two planets (Mars and Earth) aligned, which helped China and the UAE achieve the first achievement in the process of planetary exploration.
This achievement is not surprising for China, which is sending a series of amazing space missions, including robotic missions to the moon and to a space station under construction in orbit around the planet.
In 2021, the Chinese space probe “Tianwen 1” reached Mars, consisting of three parts: an orbiter, a lander and a rover called “Zhurong”.
China is the second country on the red planet
The report states that, months after the mission reached Mars orbit, the rover carrying “Zhurong” fell in the southern part of the volcanic “Utopia Planitia” plain, and thus China became the second country to land a permanent mission on the surface of the red planet, and Chinese scientists are scheduled to provide some Their early scientific results will be presented next month at the Planetary and Lunar Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, USA.
The other country was an unexpected newcomer on the surface of Mars, the Emirates, which collaborated in space flights, with engineers at the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics to build the “Hope” probe, a spacecraft the size of a small car.
The fruits of the probe “Hope”
The report asserts that the Hope probe may be smaller in size and ambition than Perseverance or Tianwen 1, but its creation provided on-the-job training for promising Emirati engineers and scientists who worked alongside their American counterparts in Boulder, Colorado.
The “Hope” probe entered the orbit around Mars and continued to orbit around it, and made measurements of the atmosphere, and “Hope” reached a number of unexpected results, especially the amount of oxygen in the upper layer of the atmosphere.
In this regard, Hessa Al Matrooshi, who is among the leaders of the scientific mission of the UAE mission to Mars, told the New York Times: “When we were comparing these results with the models we have, our results were about 50 percent higher than expected, so, This was a surprise to us.”
The “Hope” instruments found formulations in the upper atmosphere with higher concentrations of oxygen. Scientists are trying to find out the significance and importance of this surprise, according to Al-Matrooshi.
Upcoming missions to Mars
The report notes that another spacecraft, the ExoMars 2022 science mission, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, is scheduled to launch to Mars this year.
The ExoMars 2022 mission was originally scheduled to launch in 2020, but some technical problems and the “Covid-19” pandemic resulted in the postponement of the mission. The next launch opportunity will be available in late September.
At the conclusion of his report, the New York Times reporter points out that the ExoMars mission carries a probe called “Rosalind Franklin”, which is looking for indications of the emergence of life in the past or present of Mars in the “Oxia Planum” region, a plain 120 miles wide near From the equator contains minerals rich in clay.
