A busy, busy February (Hint: look at the Red Planet)

Steph P. Bianchini January 30, 2021 4 Comments

The last two weeks have been quite busy for me at work –writing articles, recording science podcasts, preparing project proposals, you name it– and all of these activities had a common focus: what is happening in the next twenty days or so. In case you have not tuned up to it yet, there’s a world-record event: three, yes, three space missions reaching Mars at some moment in January. Where do they come from? The first one is from our usual suspect, NASA, with Perseverance. But we have two absolute new entries: a mission from China (Tianwen 1) and another from the UAE (it is called Hope and was actually launched from Japanese soil). Amazing, isn’t it?

There are already plenty of articles out there, so I won’t repeat all the details of the three missions here.

I prefer offering a few reading suggestions, depending on which one of them takes your fancy. For Perseverance, the safest bet is to have a look at the NASA page, from where you can also following the landing in real time on February 18. The live coverage will start on February 16 and last until February 22, with an interesting programme of briefing and broadcasting from the Red Planet. Bookmark this link to keep updated.

For what concerns China, it depends very much on your grasp of Chinese. If we stick to English, you can have a good reading about their mission and objectives here and here. Tianwen 1 will try the insertion in orbit from February 10 onwards, and good luck with that: it is notoriously one of the most delicate moments of the whole journey.

Finally, Hope, which, differently from the other two, does not plan to land on the Martian surface but to study instead the weather patterns. For more about this mission, start from this page. Hope is due to arrive just after the Chinese, on February 11.

Stay tuned for a breathtaking Space February! Yay!