Woo hoo! Another Mars rover!

OK, not so much a question as a yay team exclamation, but let’s run with it. The Perseverance rover and its little buddy Ingenuity the helicopter launched on 30 July 2020 and arrived and landed on Mars on 18 February 2021.

 

Who else is going to Mars in the 2020 launch window?

To get from Earth to Mars with our current technology we have to use time-limited launch windows to minimize fuel requirements as well as minimizing the travel duration. So our current strategy is for a spacecraft to leave Earth in the same direction that the Earth is moving around the Sun – meaning that any fuel burn just adds to the solar orbital velocity the spacecraft already has by virtue of launching from Earth.

 

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