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“Simply put, this is probably the most scientifically meticulous sample collection mission ever conducted in one of the most promising locations on Mars to look for signs of past life,” says. jonathan luneenChief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “And, of course, if evidence of life is found in the sediments, it would be a historic discovery.”
It started auspiciously. On July 30, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, NASA’s Perseverance rover launched atop a rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Jim Bridenstine, NASA’s administrator at the time, minced no words: “We’re in extraordinary times right now,” he told reporters, “yet we’ve been really tenacious, and we’ve protected this mission because it’s so important.”
But just earlier that month, the mission to Mars had changed into a race. China was now preparing its own sample return spacecraft.
And that’s when things started to unravel for MSR.
xinmei liu
China was comparatively late in developing a competitive space program, but once it started doing so, it wasted no time. In 2003, it sent one of its astronauts into space for the first time via its own special rocket; In the two decades since, it has launched its own space station and sent several unmanned spacecraft to the Moon – first orbiters, then landers – as part of its Chang’e ProjectWhich is named after Chandra Devi.
But a real turning point for China’s interplanetary ambitions came in 2020, the same year that Perseverance launched to Mars.
That December Chang’e-5 In the moon’s storm ocean, a 1,600-mile-long field of frozen lava touched down. It grabbed rocks about 2 billion years old, put them in a rocket, and blasted them into the sky. The samples were captured by a small orbiting spacecraft; Crucially, the idea was not at all dissimilar to what MSR had envisioned for its own sample, baseball-glove style catcher. Just before Christmas, China’s Chandrayaan was landed back on Earth. This was the first time since 1976 that samples were brought back from the Moon, and the mission was uninterrupted.
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That same year, China took its first steps toward Mars. the project was called Tianwen-1meaning “Questions of Heaven” – the first in a new series of daring space missions to orbit the Red Planet and asteroids. Although there was no guarantee of success, China was ready to immediately kick into high gear, sending both an orbiting spacecraft and a rover to Mars at the same time. No other country had managed to perform this feat of space flight acrobatics in its first attempt.
