Exploring Mars is the cool thing to do

Last week we were all mired in a bitterly cold deep freeze, struggling through power outages, water loss, and other related unpleasantries.

While we were all hunkered down awaiting our day in the sun, something spectacular was happening millions of miles away on Mars (a place much colder than Texas was last week, by the way). The Perseverance Rover safely landed on the Red Planet, becoming the third earthborn spacecraft to arrive there in the span of two weeks. The previous week, Hope from the United Arab Emirates and Tianwen-1 from China, went into orbit around Mars. Perseverance, however, shot right past them for a soft landing on the surface.

The rover is the fifth one NASA has landed on Mars and is one of two currently in operation there. Piggybacked on Perseverance is the Ingenuity helicopter, the remotest of all remote-controlled aircraft. Its purpose is to demonstrate the ability to fly an aircraft in the thin Martian atmosphere (and to shoot a few really cool photos while it’s up there). The copter is scheduled for five flights over the next month. Given NASA’s success rate with robots on Mars, I get the feeling there will be more than five flights before Ingenuity is done.

For those who are curious, this is a brief history of Martian rovers. The first was Sojourner, a 23-pound roving platform about the size of a suitcase that arrived in 1997 and lasted just over two months.

Sojourner was followed in 2004 by the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Weighing in at 374 pounds each, they were the size of a golf cart. They landed in different regions of Mars and performed well beyond their expiration date. Designed to operate for a few months, Spirit rolled on for six years, sending its last signal in 2010. Its twin, Opportunity, set the rover time and distance records, lasting 15 Earth years, or eight Martian years, and covered 28 miles.

Curiosity arrived on Mars in 2012 and keeps on truckin’. It weighs nearly a ton and is the size of an SUV. Its primary mission is to find evidence of water.

Perseverance is based on the same design as Curiosity, coming in at 2,260 pounds and is about the same size. Its mission is to look for signs of past or present life and to conduct tests to see if Mars could be hospitable to humans. It will attempt to separate oxygen from carbon dioxide, among many other experiments. Perseverance’s batteries are powered by plutonium, so it is not reliant upon solar panels for power, giving it a potentially longer lifespan than any of its predecessors.

In May or June of this year China’s Tianwen-1 is set to land a rover on Mars on a 90-day mission. The UAE’s Hope spacecraft is an orbiter not designed to land.

Back in 1971 the Soviet Union sent two rovers to Mars. The first crash landed and the second stopped communicating just seconds after landing.

There is clearly a renewed interest in Mars and an unspoken space race has started to send the first humans there. NASA, which is the undisputed champion in human space exploration, is taking the scenic route this time, preferring to return to the moon first. Make no mistake, NASA is still in the running to land humans there some year.

The frontrunner right now is Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He is famously developing his Starship rockets here in Texas at Boca Chica. An unmanned ship could head to the Red Planet as early as next year. (The window for launching spacecraft to Mars opens every 26 months.) Musk has said from the start that his primary goal is to make humans a multiplanetary species and that Mars is the first step.

China, Russia and other countries are also making plans for footsteps on Mars, but are way behind NASA and SpaceX. There are other private companies with designs for Mars exploration but hey have yet to get off the ground. Barring a surprise from China or elsewhere, the safe bet is for SpaceX to arrive their first with human passengers in the late 2020s, followed by NASA in the 2030s, assuming NASA doesn’t give up because it’s not first. Either way, mankind is destined to explore Mars and beyond and these rovers (and helicopter) are paving the way for that to happen.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, Curiosity reported last week that Mars had a high of 14 degrees and a low of -117. If you thought Texas was in a cold spell, you should try taking a stroll on Mars!