Daily Archives: May 18, 2021

Overview of the exploration of Mars

The planet Mars has been explored remotely by spacecraft. Probes sent from Earth, beginning in the late 20th century, have yielded a large increase in knowledge about the Martian system, focused primarily on understanding its geology and habitability potential.[1] Engineering interplanetary journeys is complicated and the exploration of Mars has experienced a high failure rate, especially the early attempts. Roughly sixty percent of all spacecraft destined for Mars failed before completing their missions and some failed before their observations could begin. Some missions have met with unexpected success, such as the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity which operated for years beyond their specification.[2]

As of May2021[update], there are three operational rovers on the surface of Mars, the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, both operated by the United States of America space agency NASA, as well as the Zhurong rover, part of the Tianwen-1 mission by the China National Space Administration (CNSA).[3][4] There are eight orbiters surveying the planet: Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Orbiter Mission, MAVEN, the Trace Gas Orbiter, the Tianwen-1 orbiter, and the Hope Mars Mission, which have contributed massive amounts of information about Mars. The stationary lander InSight is investigating the deep interior of Mars. No sample return missions have been attempted for Mars and an attempted return mission for Mars' moon Phobos (Fobos-Grunt) failed at launch in 2011.[5] In all, there are 12 probes currently surveying Mars, with a 13th, the Ingenuity helicopter, which has completed its 5 planned flights.

The next missions expected to arrive at Mars are:

Mars has long been the subject of human interest. Early telescopic observations revealed color changes on the surface that were attributed to seasonal vegetation and apparent linear features were ascribed to intelligent design. Further telescopic observations found two moons, Phobos and Deimos, polar ice caps and the feature now known as Olympus Mons, the Solar System's second tallest mountain. The discoveries piqued further interest in the study and exploration of the red planet. Mars is a rocky planet, like Earth, that formed around the same time, yet with only half the diameter of Earth, and a far thinner atmosphere; it has a cold and desert-like surface.[6]

One way the surface of Mars has been categorized, is by thirty "quadrangles", with each quadrangle named for a prominent physiographic feature within that quadrangle.[7][8]

The minimum-energy launch windows for a Martian expedition occur at intervals of approximately two years and two months (specifically 780 days, the planet's synodic period with respect to Earth).[11] In addition, the lowest available transfer energy varies on a roughly 16-year cycle.[11] For example, a minimum occurred in the 1969 and 1971 launch windows, rising to a peak in the late 1970s, and hitting another low in 1986 and 1988.[11]

Starting in 1960, the Soviets launched a series of probes to Mars including the first intended flybys and hard (impact) landing (Mars 1962B).[13] The first successful flyby of Mars was on 1415 July 1965, by NASA's Mariner 4.[14] On November 14, 1971, Mariner 9 became the first space probe to orbit another planet when it entered into orbit around Mars.[15] The amount of data returned by probes increased dramatically as technology improved.[13]

The first to contact the surface were two Soviet probes: Mars 2 lander on November 27 and Mars 3 lander on December 2, 1971Mars 2 failed during descent and Mars 3 about twenty seconds after the first Martian soft landing.[16] Mars 6 failed during descent but did return some corrupted atmospheric data in 1974.[17] The 1975 NASA launches of the Viking program consisted of two orbiters, each with a lander that successfully soft landed in 1976. Viking 1 remained operational for six years, Viking 2 for three. The Viking landers relayed the first color panoramas of Mars.[18]

The Soviet probes Phobos 1 and 2 were sent to Mars in 1988 to study Mars and its two moons, with a focus on Phobos. Phobos 1 lost contact on the way to Mars. Phobos 2, while successfully photographing Mars and Phobos, failed before it was set to release two landers to the surface of Phobos.[19]

Mars has a reputation as a difficult space exploration target; just 25 of 55 missions through 2019, or 45.5%, have been fully successful, with a further three partially successful and partially failures.[citation needed] However, of the sixteen missions since 2001, twelve have been successful and eight of these are still operational.

Missions that ended prematurely after Phobos 1 and 2 (1988) include (see Probing difficulties section for more details):

Following the 1993 failure of the Mars Observer orbiter, the NASA Mars Global Surveyor achieved Mars orbit in 1997. This mission was a complete success, having finished its primary mapping mission in early 2001. Contact was lost with the probe in November 2006 during its third extended program, spending exactly 10 operational years in space. The NASA Mars Pathfinder, carrying a robotic exploration vehicle Sojourner, landed in the Ares Vallis on Mars in the summer of 1997, returning many images.[20]

Mars Landing Sites (16 December 2020)

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter entered Mars orbit in 2001.[21] Odyssey's Gamma Ray Spectrometer detected significant amounts of hydrogen in the upper metre or so of regolith on Mars. This hydrogen is thought to be contained in large deposits of water ice.[22]

The Mars Express mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) reached Mars in 2003. It carried the Beagle 2 lander, which was not heard from after being released and was declared lost in February 2004. Beagle 2 was located in January 2015 by HiRise camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) having landed safely but failed to fully deploy its solar panels and antenna.[23][24] In early 2004, the Mars Express Planetary Fourier Spectrometer team announced the orbiter had detected methane in the Martian atmosphere, a potential biosignature. ESA announced in June 2006 the discovery of aurorae on Mars by the Mars Express.[25]

In January 2004, the NASA twin Mars Exploration Rovers named Spirit (MER-A) and Opportunity (MER-B) landed on the surface of Mars. Both have met and exceeded all their science objectives. Among the most significant scientific returns has been conclusive evidence that liquid water existed at some time in the past at both landing sites. Martian dust devils and windstorms have occasionally cleaned both rovers' solar panels, and thus increased their lifespan.[26] Spirit rover (MER-A) was active until 2010, when it stopped sending data because it got stuck in a sand dune and was unable to reorient itself to recharge its batteries.[5]

On 10 March 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) probe arrived in orbit to conduct a two-year science survey. The orbiter began mapping the Martian terrain and weather to find suitable landing sites for upcoming lander missions. The MRO captured the first image of a series of active avalanches near the planet's north pole in 2008.[27]

Rosetta came within 250km of Mars during its 2007 flyby.[28] Dawn flew by Mars in February 2009 for a gravity assist on its way to investigate Vesta and Ceres.[29]

Phoenix landed on the north polar region of Mars on May 25, 2008.[30] Its robotic arm dug into the Martian soil and the presence of water ice was confirmed on June 20, 2008.[31][32] The mission concluded on November 10, 2008 after contact was lost.[33] In 2008, the price of transporting material from the surface of Earth to the surface of Mars was approximately US$309,000 per kilogram.[34]

The Mars Science Laboratory mission was launched on November 26, 2011 and it delivered the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars on August 6, 2012 UTC. It is larger and more advanced than the Mars Exploration Rovers, with a velocity of up to 90 meters per hour (295 feet per hour).[35] Experiments include a laser chemical sampler that can deduce the composition of rocks at a distance of 7 meters.[36]

MAVEN orbiter was launched on 18 November 2013, and on 22 September 2014, it was injected into an areocentric elliptic orbit 6,200km (3,900mi) by 150km (93mi) above the planet's surface to study its atmosphere. Mission goals include determining how the planet's atmosphere and water, presumed to have once been substantial, were lost over time.[37]

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched their Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) on November 5, 2013, and it was inserted into Mars orbit on September 24, 2014. India's ISRO is the fourth space agency to reach Mars, after the Soviet space program, NASA and ESA.[38] India successfully placed a spacecraft into Mars orbit, and became the first country to do so in its maiden attempt.[39]

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter arrived at Mars in 2016 and deployed the Schiaparelli EDM lander, a test lander. Schiaparelli crashed on surface, but it transmitted key data during its parachute descent, so the test was declared a partial success.[40]

The following entails a brief overview of Mars exploration, oriented towards orbiters and flybys; see also Mars landing and Mars rover.

Between 1960 and 1969, the Soviet Union launched nine probes intended to reach Mars. They all failed: three at launch; three failed to reach near-Earth orbit; one during the burn to put the spacecraft into trans-Mars trajectory; and two during the interplanetary orbit.

The Mars 1M programs (sometimes dubbed Marsnik in Western media) was the first Soviet unmanned spacecraft interplanetary exploration program, which consisted of two flyby probes launched towards Mars in October 1960, Mars 1960A and Mars 1960B (also known as Korabl 4 and Korabl 5 respectively). After launch, the third stage pumps on both launchers were unable to develop enough pressure to commence ignition, so Earth parking orbit was not achieved. The spacecraft reached an altitude of 120km before reentry.

Mars 1962A was a Mars flyby mission, launched on October 24, 1962 and Mars 1962B an intended first Mars lander mission, launched in late December of the same year (1962). Both failed from either breaking up as they were going into Earth orbit or having the upper stage explode in orbit during the burn to put the spacecraft into trans-Mars trajectory.[5]

Mars 1 (1962 Beta Nu 1), an automatic interplanetary spacecraft launched to Mars on November 1, 1962, was the first probe of the Soviet Mars probe program to achieve interplanetary orbit. Mars 1 was intended to fly by the planet at a distance of about 11,000km and take images of the surface as well as send back data on cosmic radiation, micrometeoroid impacts and Mars' magnetic field, radiation environment, atmospheric structure, and possible organic compounds.[41][42] Sixty-one radio transmissions were held, initially at 2-day intervals and later at 5-day intervals, from which a large amount of interplanetary data was collected. On 21 March 1963, when the spacecraft was at a distance of 106,760,000km from Earth, on its way to Mars, communications ceased due to failure of its antenna orientation system.[41][42]

In 1964, both Soviet probe launches, of Zond 1964A on June 4, and Zond 2 on November 30, (part of the Zond program), resulted in failures. Zond 1964A had a failure at launch, while communication was lost with Zond 2 en route to Mars after a mid-course maneuver, in early May 1965.[5]

In 1969, and as part of the Mars probe program, the Soviet Union prepared two identical 5-ton orbiters called M-69, dubbed by NASA as Mars 1969A and Mars 1969B. Both probes were lost in launch-related complications with the newly developed Proton rocket.[43]

The USSR intended to have the first artificial satellite of Mars beating the planned American Mariner 8 and Mariner 9 Mars orbiters. In May 1971, one day after Mariner 8 malfunctioned at launch and failed to reach orbit, Cosmos 419 (Mars 1971C), a heavy probe of the Soviet Mars program M-71, also failed to launch. This spacecraft was designed as an orbiter only, while the next two probes of project M-71, Mars 2 and Mars 3, were multipurpose combinations of an orbiter and a lander with small skis-walking rovers that would be the first planet rovers outside the Moon. They were successfully launched in mid-May 1971 and reached Mars about seven months later. On November 27, 1971 the lander of Mars 2 crash-landed due to an on-board computer malfunction and became the first man-made object to reach the surface of Mars. On 2 December 1971, the Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to achieve a soft landing, but its transmission was interrupted after 14.5 seconds.[44]

The Mars 2 and 3 orbiters sent back a relatively large volume of data covering the period from December 1971 to March 1972, although transmissions continued through to August. By 22 August 1972, after sending back data and a total of 60 pictures, Mars 2 and 3 concluded their missions. The images and data enabled creation of surface relief maps, and gave information on the Martian gravity and magnetic fields.[45]

In 1973, the Soviet Union sent four more probes to Mars: the Mars 4 and Mars 5 orbiters and the Mars 6 and Mars 7 flyby/lander combinations. All missions except Mars 7 sent back data, with Mars 5 being most successful. Mars 5 transmitted just 60 images before a loss of pressurization in the transmitter housing ended the mission. Mars 6 lander transmitted data during descent, but failed upon impact. Mars 4 flew by the planet at a range of 2200km returning one swath of pictures and radio occultation data, which constituted the first detection of the nightside ionosphere on Mars.[46] Mars 7 probe separated prematurely from the carrying vehicle due to a problem in the operation of one of the onboard systems (attitude control or retro-rockets) and missed the planet by 1,300 kilometres (8.7106au).[citation needed]

In 1964, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory made two attempts at reaching Mars. Mariner 3 and Mariner 4 were identical spacecraft designed to carry out the first flybys of Mars. Mariner 3 was launched on November 5, 1964, but the shroud encasing the spacecraft atop its rocket failed to open properly, dooming the mission. Three weeks later, on November 28, 1964, Mariner 4 was launched successfully on a 7-month voyage to Mars.[citation needed]

Mariner 4 flew past Mars on July 14, 1965, providing the first close-up photographs of another planet. The pictures, gradually played back to Earth from a small tape recorder on the probe, showed impact craters. It provided radically more accurate data about the planet; a surface atmospheric pressure of about 1% of Earth's and daytime temperatures of 100C (148F) were estimated. No magnetic field[47][48] or Martian radiation belts[49] were detected. The new data meant redesigns for then planned Martian landers, and showed life would have a more difficult time surviving there than previously anticipated.[50][51][52][53]

NASA continued the Mariner program with another pair of Mars flyby probes, Mariner 6 and 7. They were sent at the next launch window, and reached the planet in 1969. During the following launch window the Mariner program again suffered the loss of one of a pair of probes. Mariner 9 successfully entered orbit about Mars, the first spacecraft ever to do so, after the launch time failure of its sister ship, Mariner 8. When Mariner 9 reached Mars in 1971, it and two Soviet orbiters (Mars 2 and Mars 3) found that a planet-wide dust storm was in progress. The mission controllers used the time spent waiting for the storm to clear to have the probe rendezvous with, and photograph, Phobos. When the storm cleared sufficiently for Mars' surface to be photographed by Mariner 9, the pictures returned represented a substantial advance over previous missions. These pictures were the first to offer more detailed evidence that liquid water might at one time have flowed on the planetary surface. They also finally discerned the true nature of many Martian albedo features. For example, Nix Olympica was one of only a few features that could be seen during the planetary duststorm, revealing it to be the highest mountain (volcano, to be exact) on any planet in the entire Solar System, and leading to its reclassification as Olympus Mons.[citation needed]

The Viking program launched Viking 1 and Viking 2 spacecraft to Mars in 1975; The program consisted of two orbiters and two landers these were the second and third spacecraft to successfully land on Mars.

The primary scientific objectives of the lander mission were to search for biosignatures and observe meteorologic, seismic and magnetic properties of Mars. The results of the biological experiments on board the Viking landers remain inconclusive, with a reanalysis of the Viking data published in 2012 suggesting signs of microbial life on Mars.[54][55]

The Viking orbiters revealed that large floods of water carved deep valleys, eroded grooves into bedrock, and traveled thousands of kilometers. Areas of branched streams, in the southern hemisphere, suggest that rain once fell.[56][57][58]

Mars Pathfinder was a U.S. spacecraft that landed a base station with a roving probe on Mars on July 4, 1997. It consisted of a lander and a small 10.6 kilograms (23lb) wheeled robotic rover named Sojourner, which was the first rover to operate on the surface of Mars.[59][60] In addition to scientific objectives, the Mars Pathfinder mission was also a "proof-of-concept" for various technologies, such as an airbag landing system and automated obstacle avoidance, both later exploited by the Mars Exploration Rovers.[59]

After the 1992 failure of NASA's Mars Observer orbiter, NASA retooled and launched Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). Mars Global Surveyor launched on November 7, 1996, and entered orbit on September 12, 1997. After a year and a half trimming its orbit from a looping ellipse to a circular track around the planet, the spacecraft began its primary mapping mission in March 1999. It observed the planet from a low-altitude, nearly polar orbit over the course of one complete Martian year, the equivalent of nearly two Earth years. Mars Global Surveyor completed its primary mission on January 31, 2001, and completed several extended mission phases.[citation needed]

The mission studied the entire Martian surface, atmosphere, and interior, and returned more data about the red planet than all previous Mars missions combined. The data has been archived and remains available publicly.[61]

Among key scientific findings, Global Surveyor took pictures of gullies and debris flow features that suggest there may be current sources of liquid water, similar to an aquifer, at or near the surface of the planet. Similar channels on Earth are formed by flowing water, but on Mars the temperature is normally too cold and the atmosphere too thin to sustain liquid water. Nevertheless, many scientists hypothesize that liquid groundwater can sometimes surface on Mars, erode gullies and channels, and pool at the bottom before freezing and evaporating.[citation needed]

Magnetometer readings showed that the planet's magnetic field is not globally generated in the planet's core, but is localized in particular areas of the crust. New temperature data and closeup images of the Martian moon Phobos showed that its surface is composed of powdery material at least 1 metre (3feet) thick, caused by millions of years of meteoroid impacts. Data from the spacecraft's laser altimeter gave scientists their first 3-D views of Mars' north polar ice cap.[citation needed]

Faulty software uploaded to the vehicle in June 2006 caused the spacecraft to orient its solar panels incorrectly several months later, resulting in battery overheating and subsequent failure.[62] On November 5, 2006 MGS lost contact with Earth.[63] NASA ended efforts to restore communication on January 28, 2007.[64]

In 2001, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter arrived at Mars. Its mission is to use spectrometers and imagers to hunt for evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity on Mars. In 2002, it was announced that the probe's gamma-ray spectrometer and neutron spectrometer had detected large amounts of hydrogen, indicating that there are vast deposits of water ice in the upper three meters of Mars' soil within 60 latitude of the south pole.[citation needed]

On June 2, 2003, the European Space Agency's Mars Express set off from Baikonur Cosmodrome to Mars. The Mars Express craft consists of the Mars Express Orbiter and the stationary lander Beagle 2. The lander carried a digging device and the smallest mass spectrometer created to date, as well as a range of other devices, on a robotic arm in order to accurately analyze soil beneath the dusty surface to look for biosignatures and biomolecules.[citation needed]

The orbiter entered Mars orbit on December 25, 2003, and Beagle 2 entered Mars' atmosphere the same day. However, attempts to contact the lander failed. Communications attempts continued throughout January, but Beagle 2 was declared lost in mid-February, and a joint inquiry was launched by the UK and ESA. The Mars Express Orbiter confirmed the presence of water ice and carbon dioxide ice at the planet's south pole, while NASA had previously confirmed their presence at the north pole of Mars.[citation needed]

The lander's fate remained a mystery until it was located intact on the surface of Mars in a series of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.[65][66] The images suggest that two of the spacecraft's four solar panels failed to deploy, blocking the spacecraft's communications antenna. Beagle 2 is the first British and first European probe to achieve a soft landing on Mars.[citation needed]

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER), started in 2003, was a robotic space mission involving two rovers, Spirit (MER-A) and Opportunity, (MER-B) that explored the Martian surface geology. The mission's scientific objective was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The mission was part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which includes three previous successful landers: the two Viking program landers in 1976; and Mars Pathfinder probe in 1997.[citation needed]

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a multipurpose spacecraft designed to conduct reconnaissance and exploration of Mars from orbit. The US$720 million spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin under the supervision of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, launched August 12, 2005, and entered Mars orbit on March 10, 2006.[68]

The MRO contains a host of scientific instruments such as the HiRISE camera, CTX camera, CRISM, and SHARAD. The HiRISE camera is used to analyze Martian landforms, whereas CRISM and SHARAD can detect water, ice, and minerals on and below the surface. Additionally, MRO is paving the way for upcoming generations of spacecraft through daily monitoring of Martian weather and surface conditions, searching for future landing sites, and testing a new telecommunications system that enable it to send and receive information at an unprecedented bitrate, compared to previous Mars spacecraft. Data transfer to and from the spacecraft occurs faster than all previous interplanetary missions combined and allows it to serve as an important relay satellite for other missions.[citation needed]

The ESA Rosetta space probe mission to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko flew within 250km of Mars on February 25, 2007, in a gravitational slingshot designed to slow and redirect the spacecraft.[69]

The NASA Dawn spacecraft used the gravity of Mars in 2009 to change direction and velocity on its way to Vesta, and tested out Dawn's cameras and other instruments on Mars.[70]

On November 8, 2011, Russia's Roscosmos launched an ambitious mission called Fobos-Grunt. It consisted of a lander aimed to retrieve a sample back to Earth from Mars' moon Phobos, and place the Chinese Yinghuo-1 probe in Mars' orbit. The Fobos-Grunt mission suffered a complete control and communications failure shortly after launch and was left stranded in low Earth orbit, later falling back to Earth.[71] The Yinghuo-1 satellite and Fobos-Grunt underwent destructive re-entry on January 15, 2012, finally disintegrating over the Pacific Ocean.[72][73][74]

The NASA Mars Science Laboratory mission with its rover named Curiosity, was launched on November 26, 2011,[75][76] and landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater. The rover carries instruments designed to look for past or present conditions relevant to the past or present habitability of Mars.[77][78][79][80]

NASA's MAVEN is an orbiter mission to study the upper atmosphere of Mars.[81] It will also serve as a communications relay satellite for robotic landers and rovers on the surface of Mars. MAVEN was launched 18 November 2013 and reached Mars on 22 September 2014.[citation needed]

The Mars Orbiter Mission, also called Mangalyaan, was launched on 5 November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).[82] It was successfully inserted into Martian orbit on 24 September 2014. The mission is a technology demonstrator, and as secondary objective, it will also study the Martian atmosphere. This is India's first mission to Mars, and with it, ISRO became the fourth space agency to successfully reach Mars after the Soviet Union, NASA (USA) and ESA (Europe). It also made ISRO the second space agency to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt (the first national one, after the international ESA), and also the first Asian country to successfully send an orbiter to Mars. It was completed in a record low budget of $71 million,[83][84] making it the least-expensive Mars mission to date.[85]

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is an atmospheric research orbiter built in collaboration between ESA and Roscosmos. It was injected into Mars orbit on 19 October 2016 to gain a better understanding of methane (CH4) and other trace gases present in the Martian atmosphere that could be evidence for possible biological or geological activity. The Schiaparelli EDM lander was destroyed when trying to land on the surface of Mars.[86]

In August 2012, NASA selected InSight, a $425 million lander mission with a heat flow probe and seismometer, to determine the deep interior structure of Mars.[87][88][89] Two flyby CubeSats called MarCO were launched with InSight on 5 May 2018[90] to provide real-time telemetry during the entry and landing of InSight. The CubeSats separated from the Atlas V booster 1.5 hours after launch and traveled their own trajectories to Mars.[91][92][93] InSight landed successfully on Mars on 26 November 2018.[94]

The United Arab Emirates launched the Hope Mars Mission, in July 2020 on the Japanese H-IIA booster.[95] It was successfully placed into orbit on 9 February 2021. It is studying the Martian atmosphere and weather.

Tianwen-1 is a Chinese mission, launched on 23 July 2020. It includes an orbiter, a lander and a 240 kilograms rover.[96] The orbiter was placed into orbit on 10 February 2021. The Zhurong rover successfully soft landed on 14 May 2021 (UTC).[4]

The Mars 2020 mission by NASA was launched on 30 July 2020 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral. It is based on the Mars Science Laboratory design. The scientific payload is focused on astrobiology.[97] It includes Perseverance rover and Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, which undertook flights successfully. Unlike older rovers that relied on solar power, Perseverance is nuclear powered, to survive longer than its predecessors in this harsh, dusty environment. The car-size rover weighs about 1 ton, with a robotic arm that reaches about 7 feet, zoom cameras, a chemical analyzer and a rock drill.[98][99]

After traveling 293 million miles to reach Mars over the course of more than six months, Perseverance successfully landed on February 18, 2021. Its initial mission is set for at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days. It will search for signs of ancient life and explore the red planet's surface.[100][101]

Other future mission concepts include polar probes, Martian aircraft and a network of small meteorological stations.[110] Longterm areas of study may include Martian lava tubes, resource utilization, and electronic charge carriers in rocks.[114][115] Micromissions are another possibility, such as piggybacking a small spacecraft on an Ariane 5 rocket and using a lunar gravity assist to get to Mars.[116]

The human exploration of Mars has been an aspiration since the earliest days of modern rocketry; Robert H. Goddard credits the idea of reaching Mars as his own inspiration to study the physics and engineering of space flight.[117] Proposals for human exploration of Mars have been made throughout the history of space exploration; currently there are multiple active plans and programs to put humans on Mars within the next ten to thirty years, both governmental and private, some of which are listed below.

Human exploration by the United States was identified as a long-term goal in the Vision for Space Exploration announced in 2004 by then US President George W. Bush.[118] The planned Orion spacecraft would be used to send a human expedition to Earth's moon by 2020 as a stepping stone to a Mars expedition. On September 28, 2007, NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin stated that NASA aims to put a person on Mars by 2037.[119]

On December 2, 2014, NASA's Advanced Human Exploration Systems and Operations Mission Director Jason Crusan and Deputy Associate Administrator for Programs James Reuthner announced tentative support for the Boeing "Affordable Mars Mission Design" including radiation shielding, centrifugal artificial gravity, in-transit consumable resupply, and a lander which can return.[120][121] Reuthner suggested that if adequate funding was forthcoming, the proposed mission would be expected in the early 2030s.[122]

On October 8, 2015, NASA published its official plan for human exploration and colonization of Mars. They called it "Journey to Mars". The plan operates through three distinct phases leading up to fully sustained colonization.[123]

On August 28, 2015, NASA funded a year long simulation to study the effects of a year long Mars mission on six scientists. The scientists lived in a bio dome on a Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii with limited connection to the outside world and were only allowed outside if they were wearing spacesuits.[125][126]

NASAs human Mars exploration plans have evolved through the NASA Mars Design Reference Missions, a series of design studies for human exploration of Mars.

In 2017 the focus of NASA shifted to a return to the Moon by 2024 with the Artemis program, a flight to Mars could follow after this project.

The long-term goal of the private corporation SpaceX is the establishment of routine flights to Mars to enable colonization.[127][128][129] To this end, the company is developing Starship, a spacecraft capable of crew transportation to Mars and other celestial bodies, along with its booster Super Heavy. In 2017 SpaceX announced plans to send two uncrewed Starships to Mars by 2022, followed by two more uncrewed flights and two crewed flights in 2024.[128] Starship is planned to have a payload of at least 100 tonnes.[130] Starship is designed to use a combination of aerobraking and propulsive descent, utilizing fuel produced from a Mars (in situ resource utilization) facility.[128] As of mid 2021, the Starship development program has seen successful testing of several Starship prototypes.[131]

Mars Direct, a low-cost human mission proposed by Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, would use heavy-lift Saturn V class rockets, such as the Ares V, to skip orbital construction, LEO rendezvous, and lunar fuel depots. A modified proposal, called "Mars to Stay", involves not returning the first immigrant explorers immediately, if ever (see Colonization of Mars).[118][119][132][133]

Go here to read the rest:

Exploration of Mars - Wikipedia

"This Week In Space" brings you whats new and exciting in space exploration and astronomy once a week, every week. From supernovae to SpaceX or Mars missions to black holes, if its out of this world, its covered here:

China put the first piece of its planned space station into orbit, but marred the accomplishment by letting a rocket stage tumble back down to Earth in a totally uncontrolledand dangerousfashion. For several days, everyone from backyard astronomers to the US Space Force watched to see where the 23-ton, 17,000 mph projectile would crash and potentially wreak destruction. NASA and other space agencies condemned Chinas negligence, to which the Peoples Republic responded that it was being held to a double standard: when debris from the booster stage of a Falcon 9 rocket rained down over the Pacific Northwest last March, SpaceX drew much much less bad press. The key difference? SpaceX intended to deorbit its booster safely but was held back by a technical failure. China always planned to simply drop its rocket on the Earth like litter. Luckily for them, the booster broke apart over the Indian Ocean last Sunday, and no damage was done.

New map may show humanity's future in space

Travel space from your computer thanks to new mapping aided by data from the Gaia spacecraft.

In a monumental feat of cartography, a group of European astronomers have created a detailed and accurate 3D map of nearby space that you can fly through. Every known star and planet within 30 lightyears is included. These are the closest stellar systems to Earth, so there's a good chance that the first life we may ever discover on another planet outside the solar system would be around one of them. And if humanity were ever to leave the Sun for other systems, these stars would be the first destinations.

The map is a synthesis of decades of scientific results. It is polished with new data from the Gaia spacecraft, an ESA mission that aims to measure the precise locations of around 1 billion stars.

Rover captures sounds of Mars, space helicopter in flight

In a two-minute recording of audio and video from the Martian surface, the Perseverance rover watched Ingenuity, the first space helicopter, take flight and return from a nearly 900-foot round trip. Although this is Ingenuitys fourth flight, it is the first time a spacecraft has ever recorded the sound of another. Listen: underneath the steady, surreal throb of the rushing Martian wind, you can make out whirring from Ingenuitys blades as it passes close to the rover.

The goal of Ingenuity was always simply to find out what it's like to fly on Mars. Now that it has conducted test flights so successfully time and again, NASA has announced that the helicopter will soon transition to actually helping Perseverance by undertaking scouting missions.

NASA agrees to first private astronaut mission (without Tom Cruise, for now)

404095 05: Actor Tom Cruise (C), with film producer Toni Myers (3rd L) and astronauts from the International Stace Station mission Nancy Currie (L), Susan Helms (2nd L), Jim Voss (2nd R), and Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Usachev (R) flash a thumbs up as they attend the premiere of the movie "Space Station 3-D."

In a historic moment for the privatization of space, a corporation has officially bought four tickets to the International Space Station. In 2022 (at the earliest), Axiom Space will send three investors and an ex-NASA astronaut to dock a SpaceX Dragon capsule on the ISS and stay there for eight days. Although it is not exactly clear what the visitors will be up to, activities appear to include outreach for hospitals and research for the Candiian and Israeli space agencies.

The tickets are said to cost $55 million apiece. Axiom will foot the bill for their crews supplies and storage space on the station, while NASA has agreed to pay Axiom to bring low-temperature samples back to the Earth.

While it was initially thought that Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman (of "The Bourne Identity" fame) would join the mission as part of a movie they are making, this plan seems to be postponed for now. Axiom is aiming for their ISS visit to be the first of many, though. Mr. Cruise should have plenty of opportunities to become an astronaut.

Asa Stahl is an astrophysics PhD candidate at Rice University and the award-winning author of the pop science childrens book "The Big Bang Book." His research is aimed at discovering planets around other stars in order to answer some of our biggest questions, like "How special is the Earth?" and "How did we get here?" His recent book has been recognized as an Edward Jack Keats Award Honoree, an NSTA-CBC Outstanding Science Book, and a Sakura Medal Finalist.

Read the original post:

This week in space: Sounds of Mars, private astronauts in space - Chron

BEIJING -- China landed a spacecraft on Mars for the first time on Saturday, a technically challenging feat more difficult than a moon landing, in the latest step forward for its ambitious goals in space.

Plans call for a rover to stay in the lander for a few days of diagnostic tests before rolling down a ramp to explore an area of Mars known as Utopia Planitia. It will join an American rover that arrived at the red planet in February.

Chinas first Mars landing follows its launch last month of the main section of what will be a permanent space station and a mission that brought back rocks from the moon late last year.

China has left a footprint on Mars for the first time, an important step for our countrys space exploration, the official Xinhua News Agency said in announcing the landing on one of its social media accounts.

The U.S. has had nine successful landings on Mars since 1976. The Soviet Union landed on the planet in 1971, but the mission failed after the craft stopped transmitting information soon after touchdown.

A rover and a tiny helicopter from the American landing in February are currently exploring Mars. NASA expects the rover to collect its first sample in July for return to Earth in a decade.

China has landed on the moon before but landing on Mars is a much more difficult undertaking. Spacecraft use shields for protection from the searing heat of entering the Martian atmosphere, and use both retro-rockets and parachutes to slow down enough to prevent a crash landing. The parachutes and rockets must be deployed at precise times to land at the designated spot. Only mini-retro rockets are required for a moon landing, and parachutes alone are sufficient for returning to Earth.

Xinhua said the entry capsule entered the Mars atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometers (80 miles), initiating what it called the riskiest phase of the whole mission."

A 200 square meter (2,150 square foot) parachute was deployed and later jettisoned, and then a retro-rocket was fired to slow the speed of the craft to almost zero, Xinhua said. The craft hovered about 100 meters (330 feet) above the surface to identify obstacles before touching down on four buffer legs.

Each step had only one chance, and the actions were closely linked. If there had been any flaw, the landing would have failed, said Geng Yan, an official at the China National Space Administration, according to Xinhua.

Touchdown was at 7:18 a.m. Beijing time (23:18 Friday GMT; 7:18 p.m. EDT), although more than an hour passed before ground controllers could confirm the landing was a success, Xinhua said. The rover had to open its solar panels and antenna, and then it took more than 17 minutes for its signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a congratulatory letter to the mission team, called the landing an important step in our countrys interplanetary exploration journey, realizing the leap from Earth-moon to the planetary system and leaving the mark of the Chinese on Mars for the first time. ... The motherland and people will always remember your outstanding feats!"

NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted his congratulations, saying, Together with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanitys understanding of the Red Planet.

China's Mars landing was the top trending topic on Weibo, a leading social media platform, as people expressed both excitement and pride.

The Tianwen-1 spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since February, when it arrived after a 6 1/2-month journey from Earth. Xinhua described the mission as China's first planetary exploration.

The rover, named after the Chinese god of fire Zhurong, is expected to be deployed for 90 days to search for evidence of life. About the size of a small car, it has ground-penetrating radar, a laser, and sensors to gauge the atmosphere and magnetic sphere.

China's space program has proceeded in a more cautious manner than the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the height of their space race.

The launch of the main module for China's space station in April is the first of 11 planned missions to build and provision the station and send up a three-person crew by the end of next year. While the module was successfully launched, the uncontrolled return to Earth of the rocket drew international criticism including from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

China has said it wants to land people on the moon and possibly build a scientific base there. No timeline has been released for these projects. A space plane is also reportedly under development.

Associated Press researcher Henry Hou, news assistant Caroline Chen and video journalist Sam McNeil contributed to this report.

Read more here:

China lands on Mars in major advance for its space ambitions - ABC News

This image of NASA's Mars Perseverance rover shows a plate fastened to the rover aft crossbeam (lower right) with three fingernail-sized chips stenciled with nearly 11 million names of Earthlings. The full-resolution image was taken by the Perseverance rover's left Navigation Camera (Navcam) on Feb. 28, 2021.

The names were submitted as part of the Send Your Name to Mars campaign. Anyone who missed this opportunity can sign up to send their name on the next Mars mission.

The chips also include winning student contest essays that led to the selection of Perseverance as the rover's name and Ingenuity as the name for the experimental helicopter it carried to Mars. The plate has a laser-etched graphic depicting Mars and Earth connected by the Sun's rays illuminating both, and a hidden Morse code message says "Explore as One." The illustration honors plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft, and the Golden Records carried into space by Voyager 1 and 2.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built and manages operations of Perseverance and Ingenuity for the agency. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA. A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA's Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance: mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/ and nasa.gov/perseverance

See the original post:

Closeup of Send Your Name to Mars Chips on Perseverance Rover - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Plans are firming up to bring a sample of Mars back to Earth in 2031.

A joint webinar last month by NASA and Lockheed Martin, which has participated in NASA sample return missions before, l went over the Mars sample return mission and how NASA's Perseverance rover will support that effort. The hope is that, by bringing some of the Red Planet back to Earth, we can gain more insight into Mars' potential for life by using high-resolution lab instruments to examine Martian rocks.

The discussion took place just days after the Biden administration announced its intention to allocate discretionary funds to the sample mission, which would involve a series of U.S. and European spacecraft carefully ferrying pieces of Mars back to Earth.

Related: NASA's Perseverance rover kicks off audacious Mars sample-return project

The first small step of that effort will happen relatively soon on Mars. Perseverance will dump its first cache of materials at the end of its primary mission in 2023, webinar participants said, and mission planners have already mapped out a potential route that will make the most of the watery environment that filled Jezero Crater with potentially life-friendly materials billions of years ago.

"Lakes and rivers and deltas on Earth are great places to preserve ancient life, and so we think this is a great place if ancient life ever existed on Mars to be able to find it," Jennifer Trosper, Mars 2020 deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said of Perseverance's location.

Trosper showed a map filled with colorful lines, plotting potential "traverse routes" for the rover as it moves from its landing area, dodging some sand dunes en route before arriving at a suspected delta. At the delta, it will take samples of the lake bed and then move on to a nearby crater wall, Trosper said.

Then, it will be time for Perseverance to deposit its cache of samples somewhere. "We have 43 sample tubes onboard the rover, and we plan to do an initial cache at the end of our prime mission of hopefully 15 or 20 samples," she said. "It'll probably be near the crater rim or even on the delta, and then we'll continue on."

In 2026, if all goes according to plan, a sample retrieval lander will alight near the cache, using terrain-relative navigation. A fetch rover will pick up the samples and put them inside an orbiting sample container, which will then be placed aboard a Mars ascent vehicle to bring the precious package up to Martian orbit, Trosper noted.

The relay race will continue with the Mars ascent vehicle handing off the samples to an Earth-return orbiter, which will then make the several-month trip back to our planet for arrival in 2031. After entering Earth's atmosphere, the samples carefully quarantined to avoid any contamination of our planet or the package will eventually make their way to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas, Trosper said. (Johnson Space Center already contains numerous Apollo moon samples and is well equipped for protecting space stuff.)

While the Mars sample return mission is the first effort to retrieve a sample from a potentially life-friendly area, other missions have returned samples from other bodies in the solar system. Humans and robots picked up rocks from the moon in the 1960s and 1970s and sent those back to Earth, allowing scientists to hypothesize that the moon was formed from a collision between Earth and a Mars-like object billions of years ago. More recent studies of Apollo samples in the 2010s, using more advanced equipment, revealed traces of water inside samples that were previously thought to be dry.

Spacecraft have also sampled numerous comets and asteroids, and two sample-return missions are happening right now. Scientists are examining samples from Japan's Hayabusa2 mission, which landed at asteroid Ryugu in December. They're also eagerly awaiting the return of NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) capsule that will bear bits of asteroid Bennu in 2023.

But the Mars sample return will be even more ambitious, said David Mitchell, director of the Engineering and Technology Directorate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "The significance in this program versus past sample-return missions is it requires several different missions to occur over various points in time," he said.

Past missions such as Stardust, which returned a sample from a comet in 2006, show the potential for Mars samples to be examined in high definition, said University of Washington astronomer Don Brownlee, principal investigator of the comet sample return mission. As with the Apollo samples before it, scientists keep revisiting the results of the Stardust mission as equipment improves, he said. One later find in 2014, for example, revealed interstellar particles in the sample.

Brownlee said Stardust "revolutionized" scientists' understanding of comets because the mission showed a strange combination of "ice and fire" forming these icy bodies. The rocky materials in the sample were made in the inner solar system at temperatures of perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 to 1,100 degrees Celsius). Yet the icy materials were made in temperatures as low as "10s of degrees" above absolute zero, the coldest temperature that can exist, he said.

"We believe that most of the rocky materials in comets formed close to the sun," Brownlee said, noting that over time, the materials were ejected to the Kuiper Belt, the region just outside the orbit of Neptune and including Pluto's orbit where most solar system comets come from. Even more notable, most of the rocky material includes biosignatures or biological processes that are indicative of life, he said.

These findings wouldn't have been possible in space because of the power and mass requirements of the instruments, Brownlee said. "I mean, the biggest instruments used to analyze the return samples were synchrotrons, which can be as big as a shopping center," he said.

While Mars sample return is high on NASA's wish list, the agency does plan to send astronauts to the moon to collect samples. again This time, it will be as part of the Artemis program, which may set humans on the moon as soon as 2024, depending on whether the Biden administration carries through the deadline set by the previous administration.

When Artemis goes forward, a "close second" to Mars on NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green's wish list would be to see humans or helpful robots picking up a core sample from permanently shadowed craters on the moon, where volatiles such as water ice collected over 4.5 billion years from the start of the solar system.

"This will be an incredibly exciting set of material that will, I think, tell us a lot about the origin and evolution of the Earth-moon system," Green said during the webinar.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

See the original post here:

NASA really wants a Mars sample return mission. Here's what's in store. - Space.com

With a recovering economy, a strongman attitude, and a plan to dominate, China is eyeing a new frontier space. The country that recently became the centre of global condemnation over the handling of the deadly coronavirus, on Friday joined an elite club of nations to land a rover on another planet.

China's first Mars exploration mission, the Tianwen-1 probe, touched down in the Utopia Planitia basin, putting the country officially in the race to Mars which has so far been dominated by Nasa and the United States.

President Xi Jinping had last month made it clear that Beijing is now part of the interplanetary race to explore new regions of the cosmos. According to Global Times, Xi in his congratulatory letter following the maiden landing of the Chinese rover said that "this success marks a major step forward in the country's interplanetary exploration, achieving a leap from Earth-Moon system to the interplanetary one. Leaving the footprint of Chinese people on Mars for the first time marks another milestone of the country's space industry development."

Over the years, China has made it clear that after showing its willingness to risk it all on the land, air and sea, the dragon is ready to take the next leap to go beyond Earth's orbit.

China's space mission has emerged as one of the most ambitious plans under President Xi Jinping, who is pushing the envelope on this frontier. (Photo: Getty)

When countries raced to the Moon, China decided to explore a section that has been left ignored for decades- the far side (the side not visible to Earth). The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) in January 2019 successfully landed its probe Chang'e-4, named after the goddess of the Moon, on the side that always faces away from Earth. The second successful landing came on the shoulders of Chang'e-3 probe that had reached the lunar surface on December 14, 2013.

While the country also landed its third probe Chang'e-5 in December 2020 on the near side of the Moon, the probe on the far side is still transmitting exceeding its three months operational period on Earth's natural satellite. The Chang'e-5, which landed on Mons Rumker area of the huge volcanic plain Oceanus Procellarum, known as the "Ocean of Storms" created a new record by returning a sample from the lunar surface for the first time since 1976. The last lunar sample was collected by Soviet Union's Luna mission.

India had tried to unsuccessfully land a rover on the far side of the moon. With the failure of Chandrayaan-2 behind, Isro is now eyeing Chandrayaan-3 to take the journey forward.

Infographic: Rahul Gupta/India Today

The International Space Station, a home away from home, flying nearly 200 miles above Earth has been a symbol of space exploration for decades. Developed jointly by the US, Russia and other countries, the module has been home for research and experiments to make humans an interplanetary species. However, the station is set to complete its operational life in 2024 and Russia has already announced a withdrawal by 2025. While the US' plans are unclear, China is all set to give an alternative to the ageing ISS as it sends modules one after another to build its own station beyond Earth.

The country was recently in the news when one of its Long March-5, a homegrown rocket, began tumbling uncontrollably after delivering part of the space station module, putting lives and properties on Earth at risk. The rocket booster landed unceremoniously in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives not before it evoked massive criticism from across the world.

The country was recently in the news when one of its Long March-5, a homegrown rocket, began tumbling uncontrollably after delivering part of the space station module. (Photo: Getty)

Named Tiangong which translates to a Heavenly Palace, the Chinese Space Station will be able to house at least three astronauts for a long duration stay and six for a shorter time period once ready. According to Global Times, "The Tianhe module, the largest, heaviest and most complicated spacecraft that China has developed to date, will provide astronauts with a living and working space of approximately 50 cubic meters. This space will increase to some 110 cubic meters once the other two experiment modules are in place." The space station is likely to be operational by 2022 with 11 scheduled launches set to carry critical life-sustaining modules to the flying construction site.

Xi Jinping had recently said, "I hope you will vigorously carry forward both the spirit of 'Two Bombs and One Satellite' and the spirit of manned spaceflight, be self-dependent and innovative to achieve victory in space station construction, and contribute to building a modern socialist country!"

Infographic: Rahul Gupta/India Today

295 days after it was launched aboard the Long March 5 heavy rocket from China, Zhurong, a 1.85-meter-tall and nearly 240-kilogram lander-rover combination touched down on Martian surface, firming Chinese presence in not so closely contested interplanetary exploration. The rover cemented Beijing's place in an elite list of the nation to go beyond Earth and reach the surface of an unknown world to look for an age-old critical answer Are we alone?

Six scientific payloads a pair of navigation and terrain cameras, a multispectral camera, a Mars surface composition detector, a penetrating radar, a mast-mounted magnetometer and a Mars climate station are onboard the rover that will study the characteristics of the Martian soil for a three-month period of 90 Sols. China had vowed to achieve orbiting landing and roving on the Martian surface in the first attempt. While it has orbited and landed on the surface now, Chinese engineers will roll out the rover in the coming weeks.

With China now on Mars, Beijing has plans to send another mission to the Red Planet by 2028 to return Martian samples to Earth. A similar mission is in the offing by the US and the European Space Agency. Beijing is also planning to push beyond Mars with missions being planned to intercept comets and asteroids to further the study of outer space and what lies in the far and wide reaches of the solar system.

More:

'Two Bombs and One Satellite': China eyes space race from Moon to Mars and beyond - India Today

SOUTHFIELD, Mich., May 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --The Mars Agency, a global commerce marketing agency, announced today a substantial equity investment by Denver-based middle market private equity firm, Mountaingate Capital ("Mountaingate").

Founded in 1972, The Mars Agency has experienced tremendous growth since inception and has earned a stellar reputation as a leader in shopper conversion, retail intelligence, technology solutions and as a top place to work. The Mars Agency serves an impressive client roster of globally recognized and industry-leading brands. With a growing team of more than 500 employees spread across three continents, The Mars Agency is partnering with Mountaingate to accelerate growth organically as well as through selective strategic acquisitions to better serve its clients.

The Mars Agency will continue to operate as an independent agency with the same level of agility and client centricity, and this new equity funding will allow The Mars Agency to build out capabilities, strengthen its offering and further the development of the company's proprietary commerce technology platform, Marilyn.

The entire Mars Agency leadership team will remain intact across the domestic and international offices. Both Ken Barnett and Rob Rivenburgh, together with members of the senior leadership team, will continue as equity owners in the partnership. Ken Barnett will remain Executive Chairman and Rob Rivenburgh will be elevated to Global CEO. Additionally, Darren Keen remains as CEO, International Markets, responsible for the agency's continued operational expansion outside of North America.

"We have an industry-leading track record of passionately innovating and bringing cutting edge solutions forward to our clients and to the market. This gives us the financial backing to continue to do that even faster through innovation and acquisition," said Mr. Barnett. "Fueling our growth allows us to lead, retain and attract the best talent, innovate, and offer the most powerful solutions and ideas to our valued clients globally."

The Mars Agency leadership team carefully and thoughtfully chose this equity partner because Mountaingate is aligned with the company's core values and has tremendous experience accelerating technology enabled solutions. Mountaingate has invested extensively in the data and technology driven marketing services industry and has a proven process and team to complement The Mars Agency leadership group. Furthermore, this investment allows The Mars Agency to operate independently, maintaining its agility,"intrapreneurialism" and growth-minded culture to continue to optimally serve and partner with its clients a stringent component in The Mars Agency selection criteria.

"Mountaingate's extensive experience helping businesses of our size to scale within the commerce marketing industry and alignment with The Mars Agency's purpose of driving growth for our clients, our people and our community made Mountaingate the perfect partner for us," said Mr. Rivenburgh. "We are thrilled to have their support and are very excited about this next chapter of growth."

The Mars Agencyis an award-winning, independently owned global commerce marketing practice with a growth-for-clients focus. With talent spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia, they create breakthrough, connected commerce solutions by balancing the smartest humanity with the latest technology. Their latest MarTech platform, Marilyn is the first and only end-to-end commerce advisor. Learn more atwww.themarsagency.comand meetmarilyn.ai.

Mountaingate Capital is a leading buy-and-build focused middle market private equity firm based in Denver, CO, and was named one of the Top 50 best Private Equity Firms for Founder-Owned Businesses by Inc Magazine in 2019 and 2020. Learn more at http://www.mountaingate.com.

For more information, contact:Sarah Jo Sautter[emailprotected]248.506.5829

SOURCE The Mars Agency

https://www.themarsagency.com

Read more:

The Mars Agency Partners With Mountaingate Capital To Accelerate Their Ability To Respond To Their Clients Growing Needs - PRNewswire

Working with Accenture as a partner to Microsoft, the companies are further expanding a unified cloud and data foundation across all Mars businesses on Microsoft Azure, helping Mars achieve its "cloud-first" strategy and significantly fast-tracking its cloud journey as well as the realization of business growth. This digital infrastructure is providing Mars with the business insights needed to accelerate growth, profitability, speed, resiliency, sustainability and, most importantly, build and develop trust with customers and consumers by offering more responsible, transparent and compelling experiences. For example, as one of the world's largest petcare companies, Mars is driven to make a better world for pets. The company has leveraged the Azure platform to create AI-powered applications and services to support its business.

"Our relationship with Microsoft is helping transform how data and technology are used to continue ensuring compliant customer solutions and build trusted brand and consumer experiences. It will change the relationship between our brands and consumers, deliver hyper-relevant consumer experiences that include content and media, and fulfill needs and expectations across every touchpoint in the consumer's journey," said Sandeep Dadlani, chief digital officer, Mars. "After evaluating all the platforms on the market, we chose Microsoft as our primary Mars platform because of its rich portfolio of features, engineering partner ecosystem, talent availability, focus on data privacy, and security and similar cultural values and principles."

Microsoft Azure's AI and IoT solutions provide Mars with the tools and capabilities to digitize its supply chain at scale including manufacturing while enhancing the collective digital skills of Mars Associates globally. Mars has already made progress to enable this digitization, working with digital manufacturing and operations experts from Accenture's Industry X group to deploy the Azure Digital Twins IoT platform in its manufacturing facilities. Using Digital Twins to optimize production will help Mars improve margins and reduce waste, and empower on-site associates to make real-time decisions. Based on this use case, Mars will be able to quickly scale to use similar IoT technologies for optimizing manufacturing across its business segments, including food and petcare, providing process control, consistency and uniformity across product lines and helping to give the company a competitive advantage by increasing speed and capacity, and reducing operational costs. In the future, Mars plans to use digital technologies to introduce even more intelligence into the end-to-end supply-chain processes, including identifying the optimal way to create products through digital simulations that take into account climate and other situational considerations, as well as creating greater transparency and visibility into its supply chain from the point of origin all the way to the consumer.

"Through our expanded relationship, we're harnessing the expertise and insights Mars has gained from more than a century of producing some of the world's most loved brands to create a layer of intelligence that will drive reimagined experiences for Associates and consumers," said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft's Worldwide Commercial Business. "Together, we will create a foundation for cloud, data and AI that will allow Mars to grow faster and transform how work gets done."

Mars, Accenture and Microsoft share similar ambitions around sustainability, which was a key decision-making factor for Mars choosing Azure. As Mars continues to migrate key infrastructure and workloads to Azure, Microsoft's commitment to 100% renewable energy in its datacenters by 2025 will help Mars reach its own goal to reduce its total greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain by 67% by 2050. The relationship is also helping Mars make progress toward its other sustainability goals around environmental impact by implementing technology solutions for reducing the waste of energy, raw materials and water across its production facilities around the world.

The new future of work

Mars has always been considered a forward-looking and modern workplace, ranked fifth in the 2020 Fortune's Global Best Places to Work List. Mars plans to continue incorporating digital technologies to evolve and transform its workplaces, focusing on increasing Associates' digital skills. To accomplish this, Mars, Accenture and Microsoft will work together to establish an Innovation Lab to collaborate on the use of advanced technologies, to expedite time to market for new transformative use cases, direct-to-consumer initiatives, sustainability efforts and digitized product innovation. Through the Innovation Lab, Mars will focus on the future of work and how technology from Microsoft can help drive greater efficiency and effectiveness in the modern Mars work environment.

Additionally,Mars is empowering its workforce with modern workplace tools,such as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva, to drive tighter integration between its businesses and increase productivity and collaboration for its Associates.

About Mars, Incorporated

For more than a century, Mars, Incorporated has been driven by the belief that the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today. This idea is at the center of who we have always been as a global, family-owned business. Today, Mars is transforming, innovating and evolving in ways that affirm our commitment to making a positive impact on the world around us.

Across our diverse and expanding portfolio of confectionery, food, and Petcare products and services, we employ 133,000 dedicated Associates who are all moving in the same direction: forward. With $40 billion in annual sales, we produce some of the world's best-loved brands including DOVE, EXTRA, M&M's, MILKY WAY, SNICKERS, TWIX, ORBIT, PEDIGREE, ROYAL CANIN, SKITTLES, BEN'S ORIGINAL, WHISKAS, COCOAVIA, and 5; and take care of half of the world's pets through our nutrition, health and services businesses, including AniCura, Banfield Pet Hospitals, BluePearl, Linnaeus, and VCA.

We know we can only be truly successful if our suppliers and the communities in which we operate prosper as well. The Mars Five Principles Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and Freedom inspire our Associates to take action every day to help create a world tomorrow in which the planet, its people and pets can thrive.

For more information about Mars, please visitwww.mars.com. Join us onFacebook,Twitter,LinkedIn,InstagramandYouTube.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

SOURCE Microsoft Corporation

The rest is here:

Mars and Microsoft work together to accelerate Mars' digital transformation and reimagine business operations, Associate experience and consumer...

SOUTHFIELD, Mich., May 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --The Mars Agency, a global commerce marketing agency, announced today a substantial equity investment by Denver-based middle market private equity firm, Mountaingate Capital ("Mountaingate").

Founded in 1972, The Mars Agency has experienced tremendous growth since inception and has earned a stellar reputation as a leader in shopper conversion, retail intelligence, technology solutions and as a top place to work. The Mars Agency serves an impressive client roster of globally recognized and industry-leading brands. With a growing team of more than 500 employees spread across three continents, The Mars Agency is partnering with Mountaingate to accelerate growth organically as well as through selective strategic acquisitions to better serve its clients.

The Mars Agency will continue to operate as an independent agency with the same level of agility and client centricity, and this new equity funding will allow The Mars Agency to build out capabilities, strengthen its offering and further the development of the company's proprietary commerce technology platform, Marilyn.

The entire Mars Agency leadership team will remain intact across the domestic and international offices. Both Ken Barnett and Rob Rivenburgh, together with members of the senior leadership team, will continue as equity owners in the partnership. Ken Barnett will remain Executive Chairman and Rob Rivenburgh will be elevated to Global CEO. Additionally, Darren Keen remains as CEO, International Markets, responsible for the agency's continued operational expansion outside of North America.

"We have an industry-leading track record of passionately innovating and bringing cutting edge solutions forward to our clients and to the market. This gives us the financial backing to continue to do that even faster through innovation and acquisition," said Mr. Barnett. "Fueling our growth allows us to lead, retain and attract the best talent, innovate, and offer the most powerful solutions and ideas to our valued clients globally."

The Mars Agency leadership team carefully and thoughtfully chose this equity partner because Mountaingate is aligned with the company's core values and has tremendous experience accelerating technology enabled solutions. Mountaingate has invested extensively in the data and technology driven marketing services industry and has a proven process and team to complement The Mars Agency leadership group. Furthermore, this investment allows The Mars Agency to operate independently, maintaining its agility,"intrapreneurialism" and growth-minded culture to continue to optimally serve and partner with its clients a stringent component in The Mars Agency selection criteria.

"Mountaingate's extensive experience helping businesses of our size to scale within the commerce marketing industry and alignment with The Mars Agency's purpose of driving growth for our clients, our people and our community made Mountaingate the perfect partner for us," said Mr. Rivenburgh. "We are thrilled to have their support and are very excited about this next chapter of growth."

The Mars Agencyis an award-winning, independently owned global commerce marketing practice with a growth-for-clients focus. With talent spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia, they create breakthrough, connected commerce solutions by balancing the smartest humanity with the latest technology. Their latest MarTech platform, Marilyn is the first and only end-to-end commerce advisor. Learn more atwww.themarsagency.comand meetmarilyn.ai.

Mountaingate Capital is a leading buy-and-build focused middle market private equity firm based in Denver, CO, and was named one of the Top 50 best Private Equity Firms for Founder-Owned Businesses by Inc Magazine in 2019 and 2020. Learn more at http://www.mountaingate.com.

For more information, contact:

Sarah Jo Sautter

sautters@themarsagency.com

248.506.5829

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-mars-agency-partners-with-mountiangate-capital-to-accelerate-their-ability-to-respond-to-their-clients-growing-needs-301292166.html

SOURCE The Mars Agency

Excerpt from:

The Mars Agency Partners With Mountiangate Capital To Accelerate Their Ability To Respond To Their Clients Growing Needs - Iosco County News Herald