Space Agencies Get Ready To Once Again Study The Planet Mars; Target Year Is 2021

First Posted: Dec 06, 2016 04:06 AM EST

Traveling to Mars is somehow a challenge to all the space agencies, but most of them want to study the Red Planet. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) will again try to land a probe on the Red planet.

After the two Mars probe failed, the European Space Agency will now finance another probe. The ESA has another budget to spend that is around €400 million ($43,0844,000) to land a probe on Mars, as per Phys.org.

The director general of ESA, Prof. Jan Woerner, said that "This is a big amount of money that really allows us to go forward," as per a report by the BBC.

Over the weekend, the ESA announced that it will spend the cash on its planned ExoMars rover. Thus, the agency is hoping that the new mission will travel across the surface of Mars and search signs of life.

As getting to Mars is not easy, some of the agencies failed in the past, such as the Britain's Beagle 2. Though it landed safely on Mars in 2003, the space agency lost contact with it. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA discovered it in 2015. They have seen that the Beagle 2's solar panels failed to deploy and resulted in the failure of operation of the craft.

Meanwhile, the ESA is teaming up with Russia to launch the rover on the Red Planet in 2021. However, the Russian space agency also failed three times in landing a probe on Mars. Furthermore, Russia was involved in the failed Schiaparelli lander as well.

However, the only country that has successfully operated a probe on Mars is the United States. The probe stayed on the Red Planet for longer than 14.5 seconds. Thus, NASA has been constantly operating a rover on Mars since 2004, according to The Daily Caller.

As follows, NASA currently has two Mars rovers called "Curiosity" and "Opportunity." The American space agency successfully landed seven different probes on Mars and only crashed two.

In addition, if the 2021 rover will be successful, it will collect and study rock samples from Mars. It will then transmit the data back to Earth. Also, ExoMars will be the European mission that is capable of moving across the surface of Mars.