Have you recently noticed a lot of news stories on the planet Mars? Over the next week, there will be three missions to Mars represented by the UAE, China and USA.
The first space probe to arrive to the red planet was launched by the UAE. The Hope probe launched on a HII-A rocket from Tanegashima spaceport on July 19, 2020. Hope arrived in Mars orbit seven months later on February 9, 2021 in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the formation of the United Arab Emirates to occur later his year.
On February 10, China's Tianwen-1 arrived in Mars orbit. Fun fact: The name Tianwen means "Questions to Heaven" taken from a poem written by Qu Yuan between 340 and 278 BCE. The spacecraft launched on July 23, 2020 aboard a Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket and will orbit Mars for a few months before landing a rover on the Mars surface (likely in May 2021 because this is top secret).
Over the next week, NASA's Perseverance (noun - persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success) is scheduled to arrive at Mars' Jezero Crater on February 18. The seven month journey will end as the spacecraft passes though Mars' atmosphere in what is called the "Seven Minutes of Terror" as Perseverance slows down from its speed of 12,000 mph. During this time, scientists will not know whether the rover has landed safely on the Mars surface. I think you will enjoy this computer animation of the landing as seen in this link from Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL). Perseverance traveled aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on July 30, 2020.
Are you seeing a pattern in that all of these spacecraft launched in July 2020 and arrived in February 2021? You might say that the planets were in alignment for these three nations, but the real reason is that Mars and Earth were closest to each other during their journeys around the sun, which allowed the spacecraft to arrive in the quickest amount of time. It has truly been a space race as these countries are arriving at their destination 120 million miles away within a week of each other. All things considered, this was a very close race.
