• Hope: the United Arab Emirates spacecraft is inserted into the orbit of Mars

  • The new space race: the fever to bring extraterrestrial rocks

It is the busiest month on Mars.

If on Tuesday the United Arab Emirates inaugurated the series of arrivals to the red planet by getting its probe,

Hope

, inserted correctly into its orbit, today it was the turn of China and its

Tianwen-1

spacecraft

.

The Americans will arrive next week with

Mars2020-Perseverance

.

As the CCTV chain has just reported, the Asian giant has managed to enter the orbit of Mars, a complex maneuver that will help it warm up to undertake the most complex phase of its mission: to land on the Red Planet next May.

China, which has a robust space program on the Moon that last December managed to bring 1.7 kilograms of samples to Earth, is beginning its program on Mars.

The first Martian photo signed by the Asian giant was received last Friday.

Tianwen-1

took it during its approach to Mars, when it was 2.2 million kilometers from its target, as specified by the China National Space Administration (CNSA, for its acronym in English).

Since taking off from China on July 23, Tianwen-1 has traveled some 465 million kilometers.

The spacecraft made the first orbit correction on August 2, the second on September 20, and the third on October 28.

Currently, it is located at a distance of about 185 million kilometers from Earth.

According to the CNSA, the ship has passed the trip and all systems are in good working order.

Rocking

The Chinese spacecraft carries several components - an orbiter, a lander and a robotic vehicle (

rover

) - that will allow it to both orbit Mars and land in a controlled way on its surface in May.

The first landing of this season will therefore be the one carried out by NASA with its robotic vehicle Mars2020-Perseverance, a sophisticated rover that will join Curiosity, which has been on Mars since 2012. The landing of this robot that will investigate the presence of life on Mars it is scheduled for February 18.

Due to the great distance at which Mars is located, space launches from Earth are made when both planets are at the closest distance, something that happens every two years.

In this way, the trip is shortened and you can get there in about six months.

For this reason, takeoffs are scheduled during that propitious period, which is known as the launch window.

A fourth mission was to have arrived in 2021 to Mars.

ExoMars2020, from the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos, the Russian agency, had to be postponed until 2022, when the distance between Mars and Earth will again be more propitious, due to detected failures in the parachute system that could not resolved in time, in part due to the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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