"Al-Amal", "Tianwen-1", and soon "Perseverance" ... This summer 2020 is marked by the sending of three missions to Mars. Calendar reasons - every twenty-six months, the Earth-Mars trip is shorter - explain the increase in the number of flights, from mid-July to mid-August, of probes towards the red planet ... But not only.
Each of the missions, launched by the United Arab Emirates (their first on Mars), China and the United States also have a scientific aim. For the United Arab Emirates, it will be a question of studying the weather conditions of the planet; for China, to successfully put a probe into orbit and deploy a rover on its soil. Finally for the Americans, it will even be a question of extracting samples from Martian soils, in order to study their composition ... and to determine whether life has ever existed on this planet.
For Michel Viso, researcher in exobiology at the National Center for Spatial Studies (CNES), these different missions "contribute to the same objective: to know whether we are alone or not in the universe".
For the researcher, these missions also have another goal: to affirm a political position for each of the actors who participate in them. For the United Arab Emirates, it is “to interest their youth in technical and engineering work” to “get out of all oil”. As far as China is concerned, the objective is to prove that it is also a great power "in space, against the United States, which holds the first place:" most of the probes (which were on Mars) are American »Reminds us Michel Viso.
