In a new space race, Two missions to Mars are planned to take off later this year. The Americans’ Mars Science Lab and the Russians’ Phobos-Grunt. Phobos This article titled “Spacewatch: The next mission to Mars” was written by Alan Pickup, for The Guardian on Wednesday 16th February 2011 00.10 UTC After rounding the Sun’s far side 12 days ago, Mars stays hidden in our pre-dawn twilight until June. This time next year, though, it will be the brightest object in our midnight sky as it approaches opposition in the constellation Leo. By then, two more space missions should be en route to the planet. Nasa’s Mars Science Laboratory is due to be launched in November, and to make the first precision landing on Mars in August 2012. It is hoped that its 900kg rover, now named Curiosity, will spend at least a Martian year (22 Earth months or so) exploring the surface in its quest to discover whether the planet has ever been able to support life, even at the microbial level. Some five times more massive than its predecessor rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity carries 10 times more scientific equipment. It remains to be seen whether the second Mars mission, Russia’s Phobos-Grunt probe, will blast off as early as November. (China’s first planetary craft, a small Mars-orbiter called Yinghuo-1, is intended to piggy-back with it.) Phobos-Grunt is hugely ambitious with its plan to land on the Martian moon Phobos, collect samples and return them to Earth after a 34-month round trip. Phobos, a cratered potato-shaped world, measures only 27km by 22km by 18km, and orbits Mars in less than eight hours almost 6,000km above the equator. It is spiralling downwards and could impact Mars in 11m years, though tidal forces should rip it apart before then.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress. Image credit: Don Cochrane
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