NASA/JPL-CALTECH VIA AP IMAGES
“Put merely, that is essentially the most scientifically cautious pattern assortment mission attainable, performed in one of the crucial promising locations on Mars to search for indicators of previous life,” says Jonathan Lunine, the chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “And, in fact, ought to proof of life be discovered within the sediments, that might be an historic discovery.”
It obtained off to an auspicious begin. On July 30, 2020, within the throes of the covid-19 pandemic, NASA’s Perseverance rover launched atop a rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The NASA administrator on the time, Jim Bridenstine, didn’t mince phrases: “We’re in extraordinary occasions proper now,” he informed reporters, “but we have now the truth is persevered, and we have now protected this mission as a result of it’s so essential.”
However simply earlier that very same month, the mission to Mars had changed into a race. China was now prepping its personal pattern return spacecraft.
And that’s when issues for MSR began to unravel.
XINMEI LIU
China was comparatively late to develop a aggressive area program, however as soon as it started doing so, it wasted no time. In 2003, it first despatched one in all its astronauts into area, by way of its personal bespoke rocket; within the twenty years since, it has launched its personal area station and despatched a number of uncrewed spacecraft to the moon—first orbiters, then landers—as a part of its Chang’e Challenge, named after a lunar goddess.
However an actual turning level for China’s interplanetary ambitions got here in 2020, the identical yr as Perseverance’s launch to Mars.
That December, Chang’e-5 touched down within the moon’s Ocean of Storms, a realm of frozen lava 1,600 miles lengthy. It grabbed some 2-billion-year-old rocks, put them in a rocket, and blasted them into the firmament. The samples had been captured by a small orbiting spacecraft; crucially, the thought was not all that dissimilar from how MSR imagined catching its personal samples, baseball-glove fashion. China’s lunar haul was then dropped off again on Earth simply earlier than Christmas. It marked the primary time since 1976 that samples had been returned from the moon, and the mission was seamless.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
That very same yr, China made its first foray towards Mars. The challenge was known as Tianwen-1, that means “Inquiries to Heaven”—the primary in a brand new sequence of audacious area missions to the Purple Planet and orbiting asteroids. Whereas its success was removed from assured, China was prepared to kick into excessive gear instantly, sending each an orbiting spacecraft and a rover to Mars on the identical time. No different nation had ever managed to carry out this act of spaceflight acrobatics on its first strive.
