World peeping into Mars: What is in store for generations ?

Since 1960, humankind has launched dozens of missions to Mars in an effort to get to know our planetary neighbor better. Some of the missions were flybys, gathering information in brief bursts. Others were long-standing orbiters that lasted years as they traveled around the Red Planet.

Since the first successful flyby in 1965, four space agencies have successfully made it to Mars: NASA, the former Soviet Union space program, the European Space Agency and the Indian Space Research Organization, while others, including the space agencies in Japan and China, have tried.

2000s to present: Rovers and orbiters galore

The discovery of ancient water evidence on Mars sparked a renaissance in Mars exploration. NASA's Mars Odyssey launched March 7, 2001 and arrived at the Red Planet on Oct. 24, 2001. The orbiter is still conducting its extended science mission. It broke the record for the longest-serving spacecraft at Mars on Dec. 15, 2010. The spacecraft has returned about 350,000 images, mapped global distributions of several elements, and relayed more than 95 percent of all data from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

The European Space Agency launched its lander-orbiter called Mars Express/Beagle 2 on June 2, 2003. The lander was lost on arrival on Dec. 25, 2003, but the orbiter completed its prime mission in November 2005 and is currently on an extended mission. NASA's two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were sent to the surface of Mars in 2004. Each discovered ample evidence that wateronce flowed on the Red Planet.Spirit died in a sand dune in March 2010, while Opportunity continued work for nearly another decade. Opportunity fell silent during a sandstorm in summer 2018 and NASA declared the mission over in early 2019.

Another NASA orbiter, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched on Aug. 12, 2005. It began orbiting the planet on March 12, 2006. The mission has returned more data than all previous Mars missions combined.On Aug. 4, 2007, NASA launched a stationary lander called Mars Phoenix, which arrived at Mars on May 25, 2008, and found water ice beneath the surface. Phoenix's solar panels suffered severe damage from the harsh Martian winter, and communication with the $475 million lander was lost in November 2008. After repeated attempts to re-establish contact, NASA declared Phoenix broken and dead in May 2010. The damage was confirmed in orbital photos taken at the Red Planet.

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, made another attempt to reach Phobos with the Phobos-Grunt mission, which launched in 2011 and crashed on January 15, 2012, after failing to leave earth’s orbit. Phobos-Grunt was also carrying China's first attempt at a Mars orbiter, along with an experiment run by the U.S.-based Planetary Society designed to study how a long journey through deep space affects microorganisms. China’s orbiter also did not succeed in its mission.

NASA's more powerful rover, called Curiosity, arrived at Gale Crater in 2012 to search for signs of ancient habitable environments. Its major findings include finding previously water-soaked areas, detecting methane on the surface and finding organic compounds. Opportunity's design has inspired another rover, temporarily called Mars 2020, which will continue with more advanced investigations when it arrives on the Red Planet.

NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN), launched in November 2013, achieved orbit on Sept. 21, 2014, and continues to observe changes in the Martian atmosphere to better understand why it thinned over billions of years. NASA sent the Mars InSight to the Red Planet in 2018, and the spacecraft safely landed that November. As of early 2019, the lander is setting up its instruments to examine the interior of Mars.

India became the latest nation to successfully arrive at Mars in 2014, when MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission) successfully arrived in orbit. The spacecraft is far enough from Mars to image the entire planet, and it has already transmitted many images back to Earth.

For its part, the European Space Agency plans to return to Mars with two missions later this decade. The ExoMars program, which is a collaboration with Russia, launched an orbiter called the Trace Gas Orbit (TGO) and a demonstration lander called Schiaparelli in 2016. Although Schiaparelli crashed on the Martian surface, TGO is still operational. The next tranche of ExoMars is the Rosalind Franklin rover and its companion lander, which are scheduled to leave Earth in 2020.

Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover

The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the Red Planet. The mission addresses high-priority science goals for Mars exploration, including key questions about the potential for life on Mars. Perseverance takes the next step by not only seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself. The rover introduces a drill that can collect core samples of the most promising rocks and soils and set them aside in a "cache" on the surface of Mars. A future mission could potentially return these samples to Earth. That would help scientists study the samples in laboratories with special room-sized equipment that would be too large to take to Mars. The mission also provides opportunities to gather knowledge and demonstrate technologies that address the challenges of future human expeditions to Mars. These include testing a method for producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, identifying other resources (such as subsurface water), improving landing techniques, and characterizing weather, dust, and other potential environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars.Perseverance was timed for a launch opportunity between July 30 and Aug. 15, 2020, when Earth and Mars were in good positions relative to each other for landing on Mars. That is, it took less power to travel to Mars at that time, compared to other times when Earth and Mars are in different positions in their orbits. To keep mission costs and risks as low as possible, the Mars 2020 design is based on NASA's successful Mars Science Laboratory mission architecture, including its Curiosity rover and proven landing system.

Mars missions of UAE, China and US set to take off in July

Space agencies from all three nations plan to send rovers to the Red Planet to look for additional signs of past life and potentially pave the way forfuture smooth arrival on its surface.The journey will take about six months.The UAE’s Hope Probe - the first interplanetary mission by an Arab country - launches on July 15. China plans to send its inaugural Mars probe, a small remote-controlled rover, between July 20 and July 25.By far the most ambitious project, the US Mars 2020, has a planned launch date of July 30.

The probe -- called Perseverance -- is expected to spend one Mars year (or about 687 Earth days) on the planet’s surface collecting rock and soil samples that scientists hope will shed light on past life forms that may have inhabited the faraway planet.The aim of subsequent missions will be to bring those samples back to Earth. A fourth planned launch, the EU-Russian ExoMars, was postponed until 2022 due to the Covid-19 public health crisis.

Traces of life

Several dozen probes -- most of them American -- have set off for the Red Planet since the 1960s. Many never made it that far, or failed to land.The drive to explore Mars flagged until the confirmation less than 10 years ago that water once flowed on its surface.“It’s the only planet where we’ve been able to detect past signs of life, and the more we learn about it more hope there is,” Michel Viso, an astrobiologist at CNES, France’s space agency, told AFP.“It feels like something exciting is happening, and people want to be a part of it.”India and the European Union are also setting their sights on a Mars landing. In 2024, Japan plans to send a probe to explore the Martian moon Phobos.As with the moon missions, different countries have invested heavily -- in reputation and cash -- on Mars exploration, with each looking to find their specific niche, Viso noted.The holy grail, he added, is getting boots on the ground: “This represents the ‘ultimate frontier’ of space exploration. So far, only the US has done detailed feasibility studies, and in a best-case scenario achieving that goal will take at least 20 years.A swathe of Mars lander missions over the past five decades have met with varying degrees of success since the Soviet Mars 2 and 3 probes launched in 1971.NASA’s Curiosity lander, which arrived in 2012 and is designed to determine whether the planet’s environment was ever able to support microbial life forms, remains operational on the surface -- as does the Insight lander, which arrived in 2018.

Martian colonies

The UAE is thinking even longer term.The oil-rich Gulf nation plans to establish a “science city” on Earth that will reproduce Mars’ atmospheric conditions, with the goal of establishing a human colony on the Red Planet around 2117.Supporting human life on Mars presents a number of logistical challenges.Today’s Mars is basically an immense, icy desert. About 3.5 billion years ago, it lost the dense atmospheric pressure that protected it from cosmic radiation.

Scientists are still trying to determine whether the planet was ever inhabited by metabolic life forms.“Four billion years ago, the conditions on the planet’s surface were very close to those which we had on Earth when life first appeared,” including liquid water and a dense atmosphere, said Jorge Vago, the spokesperson for the European Space Agency’s ExoMars initiative.Taking up the mantle of its robot forebears, Perseverance will explore an entirely uncharted environment, the Jezero crater -- a 28-mile wide area that is believed to have been the site of an ancient river delta.It was chosen among 60 other potential landing sites, and may have sedimentary rocks that could include traces of past microbial life, liquid water and carbon.Perseverance will collect around 40 of these samples, 30 of which will be brought back to Earth to be studied.The results of the analysis -- while not as far off as the UAE’s proposed Mars colony -- will nonetheless have to wait at least 10 years.

Connecting the Article

Question for Prelims

Which of the following Mars Missions is not associated with NASA ?

(a) MAVEN
(b) Hope Probe
(c) Curiosity
(d) Perseverance

Question for Mains

‘Mars has long been a last destination of human curiosity for extra-terrestrial life but we have just peeped into the Red Planet.’ Comment.