Return to Mars
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In February 2021, three spacecraft will arrive at Mars. One is the United Arab Emirates\\u2019 Hope orbiter - the first interplanetary probe sent by the Arab world. Tianwen-1 will be China\\u2019s first mission to reach Mars \\u2013 an ambitious bid to put both a probe into orbit and a small robot on the Martian surface. But the most sophisticated of all is the United States\\u2019 Mars 2020 mission. If all goes well, it will land a car-sized robotic rover on the rocky floor of a vast crater that contained a lake more than 3.7 billion years ago. The rover, named Perseverance, will spend years surveying the geology of Jerezo crater and using a battery of new instruments to examine the rocks for any evidence that life existed in the ancient lake. It will also be the first mission to extract rock samples and package them up for eventual return to Earth, sometime in the 2030s. Andrew Luck-Baker talks to NASA\\u2019s deputy project scientist Katie Stack-Morgan and mission manager Keith Comeaux, planetary scientists Melissa Rice and Sanjeev Gupta, and astrobiologist Mark Sephton.
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