MARS IS AWASH with alien technology. On February 18th NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in a crater called Jezero, near the planet’s equator, after travelling 470m kilometres over seven months. The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter has been circling since February 9th. China’s Tianwen-1 entered the planet’s orbit a day later, and its lander and rover will attempt to touch down sometime in May or June. There were six operational satellites in orbit when Hope arrived; NASA’s Curiosity rover and InSight lander, which arrived in 2012 and 2018, respectively, are also sending back information from the planet’s surface. Why are there so many Mars missions and what do countries that send them hope to achieve?
In the late 1800s Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, fixed a telescope on Mars and observed a network of long straight lines that he believed to be canals built by an alien civilisation. In the second half of the 20th century, orbiters circling the planet returned far more detailed data about its atmosphere and surface, putting an end to the theory that a race of Martians had existed. But subsequent missions did raise new questions about alien life. They showed that Mars was once more like Earth. Streams, river valleys, basins and deltas on the planet’s surface suggest there may have been water covering its northern hemisphere. Orbiters, landers and rovers have set out to explore the planet’s topography and probe its interior for decades in the hopes of revealing whether microbial life might have existed in the past—and whether it still exists today.
There have been roughly 50 years of Mars missions before Perseverance. NASA was the first to land a craft successfully on its surface, in 1976. The latest flurry of activity is down to two things: new opportunities to answer questions about life beyond Earth, and astropolitical grandstanding. America’s rover will study the planet’s rock record and look for chemical traces of ancient microbial life, whereas the UAE’s Hope orbiter will help scientists to understand how gas escapes its atmosphere—a process that has made Mars cold and dry. Technological advances mean that samples collected by Perseverance could eventually be brought back to Earth, allowing more detailed analysis.
But space exploration is also a matter of prestige and techno-nationalism. China’s growing space race with its neighbours, India and Japan, which have also sent probes to Mars, reflects their jostling for influence on Earth. The UAE, the space agency of which was founded only in 2014, has crowed that its Hope orbiter is the first interplanetary mission by any Arab country. This posturing is a far cry from the white-hot space rivalry between America and the Soviet Union during the cold war, and there is plenty of collaboration, too: NASA is working with the European Space Agency to retrieve samples collected by Perseverance, for example. But the number of new spacefaring countries reflects a diffusion of wealth, technology and power.
As well as the UAE, lots of other countries have founded space agencies since 2010, including Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, South Africa and Turkey. For now, states have a monopoly on Mars. But billionaires want in, too. Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, a private rocketry firm, claims he will launch people to Mars by 2026. Jeff Bezos recently announced that he will step down as the chief executive of Amazon partly to focus on his space venture, Blue Origin. Last month the company successfully tested a rocket designed to carry passengers, although Mr Bezos prefers the idea of floating space colonies to dusty rocks like Mars. One day a trip to Mars may be more about leisure than scientific endeavour. As Perseverance scours the planet’s surface for clues of ancient life, new life is preparing to set foot.