SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Red Rover Red Rover and a Sat looking over

Here are the three missions to Mars that are happening this month:

On July 30, NASA is sending Curiosity a new friend: their fifth Mars rover since the start of the program, called Perseverance.

Perseverance’s main mission is to look for signs of past life on Mars by studying the geology and taking rock and soil samples to be analyzed on Earth later.

[...] Like the Americans, China is landing a rover on Mars this summer, called Tianwen-1, according to a press release from the China National Space Administration.

Although not many details of the mission have been released, the rover is set to launch sometime in July, and is China’s first Mars exploration mission.

The United Arab Emirates are not landing a rover on the planet, but are instead launching a mission to orbit Mars and observe from space.

[...] The mission is aiming to understand the climate dynamics of Mars, the structure of Mars’ atmosphere and why hydrogen and oxygen are escaping from the upper atmosphere into space.

[...] Although these three missions are being operated by different countries, and have different goals, they all serve as important stepping stones towards the ultimate quest: achieving a human expedition to Mars by the end of the century.

Original Submission