-Traffic. We all hate traffic.
-Will you look at that traffic?
The skyway is jammed.
-But space traffic?
Now, that's exciting.
-This is an extraordinary time, to have not one, not two,
but three spacecraft arriving at Mars
from three different countries all arriving at the same time.
-We announced that the UAE has now entered
the red planet's orbit.
[cheers and applause] -The first to arrive was Hope,
an orbiter sent by the United Arab Emirates,
the first Arab country to reach the Red Planet.
The second to arrive was China's Tianwen-1.
It's both an orbiter and a lander.
Last, but not least, NASA's Perseverance is expected
to land on Mars on February 18th.
These gals launched in July 2020.
And, yes, they've just been zooming through space
for the last six months.
-Perseverance is really a step
in a series of steps of Mars exploration.
-Meet Dr Thomas Z.
This will be his second Mars landing.
-So, Perseverance is therefore focused on
search of ancient life
and, really, of the geology and the climate history,
specifically focused on this crater,
this very promising part of Mars.
-The Perseverance rover is headed to Jezero Crater,
and it'll be the most difficult landing NASA's ever attempted.
Limited by the tough terrain, Perseverance is aiming
for a significantly smaller target on the planet's surface.
If it misses, it could be destroyed.
Eight years of work, gone.
-So I did a little bit of math. -This is Ben Guarino.
He covers space and science at The Post.
-If you compare the ratio of 4.
8 miles to 300 million miles, that's about the same scale
as a one and a quarter-inch bull's-eye on a dart board
and, if you're standing in Washington, DC, you'd throw it,
and you get a bull's-eye in Dallas, 1,200 miles away.
So we're talking about huge magnitudes here.
-Once it lands, it will join the Curiosity rover,
which has been roaming Mars for over eight years.
-It's very similar in design and build to the Curiosity
rover that's been on Mars for quite some time now.
-This is Ellen Stofan.
She studies the surfaces of other planets,
and she used to be a chief scientist at NASA.
-But it's got a whole new suite of instruments to study Mars,
and it also has a technology demonstration helicopter,
named Ingenuity, on board.
We also are doing something very different on Perseverance --
that we're going to cache some samples.
Now, caching a sample basically means picking up some rocks
and putting them in a little tube.
And why are we doing that?
Well, because our next big mission to Mars
is going to be a sample-return mission.
So we're going to send another spacecraft
towards the end of the decade
to actually pick up some of those little tubes or caches,
and we're going to bring them back to Earth.
-All three spacecraft launched at the same time,
but it's not a competition, bro.
They had to.
-Mars and Earth are only on the same side
of the Sun every 26 months.
-This is Christian Davenport.
He also covers space and science at The Post.
-If you don't make that window,
you're going to have to wait another two years,
another 26 months, to launch your spacecraft
so that you have, you know, the shortest distance.
-The other spacecraft
are already successfully orbiting Mars.
-The Hope spacecraft is going to stay in orbit around Mars,
seeing how those dust storms on Mars moves around.
And China, as well, is going to be, you know,
searching for potential signs of life,
searching for signs of water.
-China's spacecraft is currently orbiting Mars,
but they plan to land it as early as May.
There's a bit of a standoff
between the US and China in space.
NASA is barred from working with China,
and China isn't contributing
to the international space community.
On the other hand, the UAE has been very collaborative.
-When the UAE was designing their spacecraft,
they really wanted to understand,
"What's the US doing, what have other missions accomplished,
and how can we do something that adds
to this great body of knowledge of how do we understand Mars
and how it's evolved in the history"?
-The UAE has said that, as soon as they start
getting data back, they're going to be sharing that
with the international community.
-It just fills me with hope of what's possible,
not only at Mars, but also on Earth.
-It'll be a nerve-wracking day, for sure.
-I'm going to be very, very nervous.
And I never know how I'll look when I'm really, really nervous.
My eyes are just tremendously big and fearful.
-Space is hard. -This is probably one of
the most difficult engineering feats that humanity faces.
-There's a 50/50 chance
that Perseverance will crash and burn.
It's high-risk, but high-reward.
A successful mission could mean proving, once and for all,
that there was or is life on Mars.
-And could there not just be life out there,
but intelligent life?
Not just in our solar system, but in our galaxy
and in the universe.