Hope for Mars

 It's traffic jam month on Mars.

"Hope," the first space probe built by the UAE entered Mars orbit today.  The journey of exploration goes on, and it's great every time a new participant succeeds.  In this case, it's especially interesting because the UAE program leaders didn't start by doing something relatively easier, like a lunar probe.  They went for broke to study a far more distant object, and the gamble paid off. You can find more details here.

The related news includes the first photograph of Mars by a Chinese probe, Tianwen-1, which was successfully inserted into Mars orbit. Next, coming up on February 18, we have the capper to this very busy month on and around the Red Planet.  At about 3:55 EST, the NASA rover Perseverance will touch down just north of the equator in Jezero Crater, formerly the site of a lake and a likely place to detect any signs of past microbial life.  

In the Apollo days, we thought human feet would touch Mars long before now. It's taking longer than we thought, but the robotic fingerprints of Earth ingenuity are all over Mars. Despite the previous orbiters and rovers, this is a big and complex world.  No one yet knows what we'll find as we keep going.  

Image: Perseverance detaching from the upper portion of the lander (NASA). This "skycrane" approach under power is necessary because parachutes can slow a probe only so much in the thin Martian air. Any human travelers will also have to land using rockets to slow the descent.