In 2020, Mars reached opposition, putting it in an advantageous position for minimizing the time a probe would need to get there. Taking advantage of the positioning, three nations launched probes to the red planet. The United Arab Emirates launched its first space probe to Mars, known as Hope, or Al-Alamal in Arabic. The probe will study Mars' weather and climate to understand how Mars lost most of its atmosphere. China launched a probe called Tianwen-1. The mission included an orbiter, two deployable cameras, a lander, a remote camera, and a rover named Zerhong, to explore the surface while the orbiter analyzes the atmosphere. The United States launched its Mars 2020 mission to land a rover named Perseverance, along with a helicopter named Ingenuity. Its mission is to search for signs of ancient microbial life, as well as to collect Martian rocks for future pickup and delivery to Earth. In 2021, all three probes successfully arrived at the red planet. Here's the first image release of Mars from Al-Alamal. It shows Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in our solar system. Here's an early photograph from Tianwen-1. It's a high-death image of Mars' North Pole. The American mission used the existing reconnaissance orbiter from 2006. Here's its picture of the Perseverance landing site. Here are a few images from China's rover Zerhong. Since its landing, it has been traveling southward to explore and inspect the terrain and has taken daily images of rocks, sand dunes, and other features. With its various instruments, it has also been collecting data on Mars' magnetic field, weather, and subsurface. For the US, Perseverance is the fifth rover to explore Mars. In 2013, Curiosity was roaming the Martian landscape. I put myself on one of the pictures in the 2013 edition of the How Far Away is a chapter on the solar system. Here we are on the surface of Mars. This is the furthest planet from the Sun, where a person can actually find dry land to stand on. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate and pave the way for human exploration. But the main goal of the Mars 2020 mission is to search for signs of past life. To that end, they chose to land Perseverance in Jizarro Crater. This believed the area was once flooded with water and was home to an ancient river delta around 3.5 billion years ago. Conceivably, microbial life could have lived in Jizarro during one or more of Mars' wet periods. This image shows Perseverance's journey across the crater's floor since landing in February. At an area called Citadel, it successfully collected its first two rock samples. Here's a picture of a rock that provided core material. You can see the drill holes. Each sample is stored in a special container. You can see the material at the center, inside a titanium sample collection tube. Subsequent NASA missions in cooperation with the European Space Agency will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. This panoramic view features several of the long, steep slopes of the river delta created by rivers that flowed into the ancient lake. The crater itself is 48 kilometers wide. That's 30 miles. In order to facilitate exploration and find the best places to collect rocks, the mission also included a helicopter in Genuity. Here's a clip of its first flight captured by Perseverance. Given Mars' thin atmosphere, the rotors need to rotate at 2,700 RPM. That's more than five times the average rotor rotational speed for helicopters on Earth. Here's a picture of Perseverance's tracks captured by ingenuity. And here we see ingenuity's shadow captured by ingenuity itself. I think we'll have more news on Mars over the coming years. I'm looking forward to it.