Destination, Mars! Pictures celebrate the launch of three bold spacecraft

Perseverance parachute. This is the parachute that will guide the US$2.7-billion, plutonium-powered, 1,025-kilogram rover down to the Martian surface. When Perseverance hits the atmosphere next February, it will be travelling at roughly 19,500 kilometres per hour. It will deploy the parachute — shown here being tested in a wind tunnel in 2017 — along with a ‘sky crane’ system that will fire retrorockets to slow it down as it approaches the planet’s surface.

Rover assembly. Before being sent into space, the Perseverance rover had to undergo weeks of testing. This time-lapse video shows scientists working on the rover in the simulator building at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. This was the first time it carried its full weight on its legs and wheels. If it reaches the red planet’s surface safely, Perseverance will spend at least one Mars year — equivalent to nearly two Earth years — exploring the landscape. It is kitted out with scientific instruments, including cameras, a weather station, a radar to scan beneath the planet’s surface, and a laser that will probe rocks to study their chemical make-up. Perseverance also carries two microphones, which it will use to capture the sounds of Mars for the first time.

Martian lake. This is the Jazero Crater — the site where it is hoped Perseverance will land. More than 3.8 billion years ago, a river flowed into the 45-kilometre-wide crater, and filled it with water (Jezero means ‘lake’ in several Slavic languages). Previous studies suggest that, along the crater’s rim, carbonate minerals settled out and hardened into rock. On Earth, ancient carbonate rocks hold some of the oldest-known evidence of life, so if life on Mars ever existed, Jezero’s carbonates are a good place to look for it.

Heavenly take-off. China’s mission, Tianwen-1 (which means ‘questions to heaven’), aims to conduct a global survey of Mars, including studying its geological structures, surface characteristics and climate. The 5,000-kilogram craft — which contains a lander, orbiter and rover — blasted off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center in Hainan Island on 23 July aboard a Long March-5 rocket. It will be the country's first attempt to land a probe on Mars.

Hovering lander. This picture — taken in November 2019 — shows Tianwen-1’s lander at a testing facility in Huailai, China, after it had completed a hovering and obstacle-avoidance test. In April 2021, the lander and a six-wheeled, solar-powered rover will be released by the orbiter, and touch down somewhere on the planet’s Utopia Planitia, a vast plain littered with volcanic rocks. The rover is packed with scientific instruments, including several cameras, a spectrometer, a magnetic-field detector and ground-penetrating radar that will study some of the geological structures just below the planet’s surface.

Sound check. The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE’s) Hope mission was the first to launch this year, beginning its journey to the red planet on 20 July from the Tanegashima Space Center near Minamitane, Japan. Here, the Hope probe undergoes acoustic sound testing, in which it is surrounded by high-powered speakers that are used to simulate some of the extreme acoustic conditions and vibrations that would be experienced during the launch and later manoeuvres. The mission is the Arab world’s first interplanetary spacecraft, and work on it began just six years ago when the UAE’s national space agency was created. The agency hired US collaborators — mainly from the University of Colorado, Boulder — to guide it through the process, and the probe’s construction took place mostly in the United States, with the involvement of 75 Emirati scientists and engineers.

Spaceship cargo. Packaged inside a climate-controlled shipping container, the Hope probe is loaded onto a plane, ready to be transported to the launch site from the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mission had to be shipped earlier than planned in order to comply with international travel restrictions. Groups of engineers, travelling two weeks apart, had to tag-team to make sure the craft was always in expert hands while they adhered to quarantine rules, and some last-minute tests on the probe had to be cancelled.

Mission control. Staff monitor the progress of the Hope probe in the mission control room at the MBRSC about a week after its launch. Controllers now face a 7-month wait as Hope travels the 493 million kilometres to the red planet. It will reach Mars in February 2021, where it will study the atmosphere from an unusual elliptical orbit that allows it to observe almost the entire planet, across both night and day, in each 55-hour cycle. It will produce the first global map of the Martian weather over days and seasons, and generate data that scientists hope will reveal how Mars lost its atmosphere.