Photo: NASA
Six. This is the number of rovers presently deployed by humanity on the surface of the Red Planet, five of them wearing the American flag, and the sixth, the Chinese one. They are accompanied by around 20 landers of different shapes and sizes, and a small number of orbital hardware. And Mars is about to get even more crowded.
In 2021 alone we’ve had two rovers land there, first NASA’s Perseverance and then China’s Zhurong. And for the first time in history, one such machine is doing something that will require even more hardware to be sent up there.
It’s the Perseverance rover we’re talking about, whose many missions include something called sample collection. That’s right, the rover is gathering pieces of Martian rock and soil and deposits them in the hope of some other machine coming to pick them up.
For a while now NASA and ESA have been working on something called the Mars Sample Return mission. It’s supposed to take off in 2026, land on Mars, pick up samples, and then come back to Earth with them, marking the first time in history when humans snatch bits of another planet and bring them home.
To give us an idea of how much hardware the mission needs, one of NASA’s artists came up with the pic that is featured as the main photo of this piece. It shows what may very well be the largest collection of machines ever assembled in one place on the surface of the planet – granted, that’s not what’s going to happen, but puts things into perspective a bit.
For the Sample Return, they need a rocket to launch the mission and a spaceship to get it to where it's going. Once on location, the space agencies will deploy a lander near the Jezero Crater where Perseverance is currently minding its own business. From it, a rover would deploy, going after the samples stored by Perseverance.
The lander also holds an ascent vehicle, which will take off to rendezvous with an orbiting spacecraft as soon as the rover brings back all the samples. Then, a lander is needed to deliver the samples to the surface of our planet.
For all intents and purposes, the Sample Return Mission will be the most complex robotic operation performed on alien worlds. If it succeeds, it might unravel one of the planet’s closest guarded secrets, the existence of life. And this is why we’re not one bit sorry the Martian surface will soon be littered with robots.
It’s the Perseverance rover we’re talking about, whose many missions include something called sample collection. That’s right, the rover is gathering pieces of Martian rock and soil and deposits them in the hope of some other machine coming to pick them up.
For a while now NASA and ESA have been working on something called the Mars Sample Return mission. It’s supposed to take off in 2026, land on Mars, pick up samples, and then come back to Earth with them, marking the first time in history when humans snatch bits of another planet and bring them home.
To give us an idea of how much hardware the mission needs, one of NASA’s artists came up with the pic that is featured as the main photo of this piece. It shows what may very well be the largest collection of machines ever assembled in one place on the surface of the planet – granted, that’s not what’s going to happen, but puts things into perspective a bit.
For the Sample Return, they need a rocket to launch the mission and a spaceship to get it to where it's going. Once on location, the space agencies will deploy a lander near the Jezero Crater where Perseverance is currently minding its own business. From it, a rover would deploy, going after the samples stored by Perseverance.
The lander also holds an ascent vehicle, which will take off to rendezvous with an orbiting spacecraft as soon as the rover brings back all the samples. Then, a lander is needed to deliver the samples to the surface of our planet.
For all intents and purposes, the Sample Return Mission will be the most complex robotic operation performed on alien worlds. If it succeeds, it might unravel one of the planet’s closest guarded secrets, the existence of life. And this is why we’re not one bit sorry the Martian surface will soon be littered with robots.
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