“This month, three different nations will arrive on Mars, the United States, China and the UAE. That’s… that’s unheard of… right? This is a historic time!” says Jim Adams, the retired former deputy chief technology officer of NASA and former deputy director of planetary science, who spent nearly three decades with the space agency.
Indeed, February 2021 will be a particularly significant month for the realisation of the dream of eventually landing a human (or humans) on Mars. The China National Space Administration’s (CNSA) spacecraft, the Tianwen-1, launched July 2020, is expected to reach Mars’ orbit by 10 February 2021 and land its rover by May. The United Arab Emirates Space Agency’s Hope probe, which is part of the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), the UAE’s first mission to Mars, was expected to reach the planet’s orbit a day earlier, on 9 February. It is designed to create a complete picture of the planet’s atmosphere and give scientists a better idea of