Countdown to Mars: three daring missions take aim at the red planet

Countdown to Mars: three daring missions take aim at the red planet



The US rover Perseverance will land in Mars’s Jezero Crater (circled in yellow). (Emily Lakdawalla/ISRO/ISSDC)

Three daring missions count down to Mars

The United States, China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will soon launch missions to Mars — a notoriously dangerous destination for spacecraft. Each mission is groundbreaking in its own way. The United States is sending its fifth rover, NASA’s most capable ever, in the hope of finding evidence of past life on Mars and collecting a set of rocks that will one day be the first samples flown back to Earth. China aims to build on its lunar-exploration successes by taking one of its rovers to Mars for the first time. And the UAE will be launching an orbiter — the first interplanetary mission by any Arab nation — as a test of its young but ambitious space agency.

Nature | 11 min read