May 14, 2021
China has become only the second nation to successfully land a spacecraft on Mars on Friday, joining the United States. Tianwen-1
, China’s first mission to the Red Planet, launched in the middle of last year, sharing the particularly busy July 2020 Martian launch window with NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, including the
Perseverance rover and
Ingenuity helicopter, and the United Arab Emirates’ Al Amal orbiter.
Tianwen-1’s orbiter section successfully separated from it’s lander section, which then successfully landed on Mars’ Utopia Planitia, carrying with it a small rover called Zhurong. Landing occurred at 23:11 UTC.
The spacecraft launched from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the southern Chinese island of Hainan aboard the fifth flight of the country’s Long March 5 heavy lift rocket on 23 July 2020. As well as marking the first time the Long March 5 had launched a payload beyond Earth orbit, the launch of Tianwen-1 also marked China’s first mis
Mars Express and the case of the large, mysterious Martian volcano cloud
April 21, 2021
Throughout the southern Martian hemisphere’s spring and summer seasons, a large, expansive cloud emerges daily from the volcano Arsia Mons. Why this cloud only forms at this location on Mars, what kind of cloud it is, and other puzzles to this phenomenon have plagued researchers for years as observing Martian weather usually only happens by accident during other investigations.
Now, a team of researchers primarily using the Mars Express orbiter from the European Space Agency (ESA) as well as data from past and present NASA and ISRO spacecraft have pieced together the mystery surrounding this cloud.
NASA, Perseverance in epicly successful entry, descent, and landing at Jezero Crater, Mars
February 18, 2021
After years of hard work and labor, NASA succeeded in the most complex landing ever attempted on another planet.
Perseverance safely touchdown at Jezero Crater at an actual time on Earth of 15:43 EST (20:43 UTC) with confirmation of landing received 11 minutes 22 seconds later through the Madrid, Spain facility of the Deep Space Network at 15:55 EST (20:55 UTC).
Arriving at Mars, and the challenges thereof
Historically, there is now with Al-Amal, Tianwen-1, Perseverance’s successes a better than 50% chance of succeeding in placing a spacecraft at Mars, whether that’s inserting it into orbit or landing it on the surface.
Space exploration achieved several notable firsts in 2020 despite the Covid-19 pandemic, including commercial human spaceflight and returning samples of an asteroid to Earth.
This year is shaping up to be just as interesting. Here are some of the missions to keep an eye out for.
Artemis 1
Artemis 1 is to be the first flight of the NASA-led, international Artemis program, whose goal was (originally) to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. Artemis-1, which is still scheduled for launch late this year, will consist of an uncrewed Orion spacecraft which will be sent on a three-week flight around the moon. It will reach a maximum distance from Earth of 280,000 miles (450,000 km), the farthest into space that any spacecraft that can transport humans will have ever flown.