Take Our Virtual Trip to Mars - Issue 89: The Dark Side

If you sit down with pencil, paper, and enough of an aptitude for orbital dynamics you'll soon discover that the easiest, most efficient trajectories to take us from Earth to a place like Mars involve great elliptical arcs around the sun. But these pathways (called Hohmann transfer orbits) require good timing, so that when we arrive at the orbit of Mars the planet is also there at that precise moment and not tens of thousands of miles away. Consequently, there is a season for going to Mars, and this year sees no less than three missions vying for a chance to explore another world, and launching within weeks of each other. The United Arab Emirates Space Agency has its Hope orbiter (aiming to study Mars's atmosphere), China has the Tainwen-1 mission (with no less than an orbiter, a lander, and a rover) and the United States has NASA's Mars 2020, consisting of the rover Perseverance and a helicopter demonstrator called Ingenuity. It begins like a classic romance: Two black holes meet.