Millions around the globe watched Elon Musk's SpaceX launch one of world's most powerful rockets. DW explains what you need to know about the historic launch.
Image: picture alliance/ZUMA Press/SpaceX
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SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy rocket
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SpaceX's largest rocket blasted off on Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on its highly anticipated first test flight toward an orbit near Mars.
The unmanned Falcon Heavy propelled itself into space shortly after 3:45 p.m. (2045 UTC) to resounding cheers at SpaceX mission control in southern California.
Minutes after launch, two of the Heavy's booster rockets landed safely on the Cape Canaveral launch pad, a technological feat the company and CEO Elon Musk has promised will drastically reduce the costs of spaceflight.
Here are five key facts you need to know about the launch:
1. Elon Musk expected it to blow up
Elon Musk himself said that he'd consider Tuesday's launch a "win" if the Falcon Heavy rocket makes it "far enough away from the pad that it doesn't cause pad damage."
In other words, he was fine with it failing (exploding)... but hoped it wouldn't take any infrastructure along with it in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He's seen his rockets die before, and it could have happened again today.
Why would it have failed? The Falcon Heavy is best imagined as three separate rockets glued together. If one of the three malfunctions, there's a high chance of systemic failure.
2. What's inside
The rocket is carrying Musk's cherry red Tesla Roadster with a dummy in the driver's seat wearing one of SpaceX's sparkling new spacesuits. Back in December, Musk tweeted that the vehicle would be playing the song "Space Oddity" by David Bowie as it took off and that the glove box would contain a copy of Douglas Adams' book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," along with a towel and a sign with the words "Don't Panic," a reference to the book.
3. Where it's going
There seems to be some popular confusion that the roadster is going to land on Mars. It isn't. The idea is for the Falcon Heavy to propel the car into an orbit around the sun that approximates the orbit of Mars (but without the risk of it actually crashing into Mars and infecting it with Earth bacteria). There it would remain for quite some time.
(Others have theorized that the car would likely be retrieved by humans or humanoids at some point and auctioned off to the highest bidder.)
SpaceX fans say the "car thing" is Elon Musk having a bit of fun — as he well should after creating the world's most powerful operational rocket with his own private company in just over a decade.
Critics say it's a PR stunt that adds dangerous junk to our solar system and shows how little he cares about space debris:
(LEO means Low Earth Orbit.)
In any case, it takes months for any spacecraft to reach Mars, so there's still plenty of time to debate this one.
4. The rocket
The rocket's three "cores," or boosters, are designed to return to separate landing pads and softly touch down in an upright position. Two returned to Cape Canaveral successfully, but it was not immediately known whether the third had successfully touched down on a drone ship floating at sea. Footage of the two successful landings offered an exquisite act of rocket choreography, and expect someone (maybe us here at DW Sci-Tech) to underlay that footage with some fitting, classical music.
5. Who cares?
This is the dramatic opening salvo in Musk's mission to colonize Mars. The Falcon Heavy can carry nearly 17,000 kilograms to the Red Planet (37,000 lbs), and this is the rocket that's expected to kickstart the SpaceX campaign. That campaign is slated to put a million Earthlings on Mars by 2062. If that sounds ambitious, note that Musk often misses deadlines but usually hits the mark.
For those of us in Europe, the launch's timing gave many kids the opportunity to watch it live.
The launch may have doused their young imaginations in rocket fuel, but more importantly, it was a safe, soft practice run (No real humans onboard! No death! No sadness!) for a strange new world that's going to become their future very soon: where human beings travel to Mars and just … stay there.
And if they ask who made the rocket, they'll find out that it was created by a guy who was bullied and beaten up by other kids back when he was in school.
Image: Reuters/L. Nicholson
Is there a better bedtime story for kids?
NASA's rover Perseverance has landed on Mars
Perseverance is NASA's fifth Mars rover and its biggest and heaviest to date. Its mission on the Red Planet has started this Thursday.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A new rover for the red planet
NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover (shown in artist's illustration) is the most sophisticated rover NASA has ever sent to Mars. Ingenuity, a technology experiment, will be the first aircraft to attempt controlled flight on another planet. Perseverance touched down at Mars' Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021 at about 20:57 UTC with Ingenuity attached to its belly.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Everything prepared
NASA engineers loaded the Mars rover Perseverance onto an Atlas V rocket at the start of July 2020. The rocket took off on July 30 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rover arrived at the orbit around Mars in early February 2021.
Image: NASA
Presentation in a clean room
This is how Perseverance looked when it was presented to the public in 2019. The rover will support NASA's Curiosity rover, the most modern rover until Perseverance came along. The new rover weighs a little over a ton — 100 kg (220 pounds) more than its predecessor. And at 3 meters (10 ft) long, it's also 10 centimeters longer as well.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
More performance
Perseverance can be loaded with more research instruments and sensors than its predecessor. And its gripper arm, with its cameras and tools, is stronger, too. The rover can collect samples from Mars. It's got 23 cameras and many other instruments. One mission is to test whether it's possible to extract oxygen from Martian rock. But, hey, what's that standing next to the rover on the ground?
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A small drone
That's right! Perseverance has a helicopter onboard. That's never happened on a planetary mission before. The helicopter is completely new territory for its developers. It will be the first time they're able to experience and collect data from flight in atmospheric conditions that are different from those on Earth, and in a gravity that is about a third of our own.
Image: NASA/Cory Huston
The robotic giant
Curiosity is the largest and most modern of all Mars rovers currently deployed. It landed on August 6, 2012, and has since traveled more than 21 kilometers (13 miles). It is much more than just a rover. Its official name is "Mars Science Laboratory," and it really is a complete lab on wheels.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Nasa/Jpl-Caltech/Msss
What's in it?
For example, it contains a special spectrometer, which can analyze chemical compounds from a distance with the help of a laser; a complete meteorological station that can measure temperature, atmospheric pressure, radiation, humidity and wind speed; and most importantly, a chemistry lab that can run detailed analyses of organic compounds and is always on the hunt for traces of alien life.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Not just scratching the surface
Curiosity has shown that life would theoretically be possible on Mars. But it hasn't discovered any life, yet. The robot's arm is equipped with a full power drill. Here, it's taking a sample in "Yellowknife Bay" inside the Gale Crater.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Off to the lab!
The Mars dust is processed by a large number of instruments. First, it's filtered and separated into different-sized particles. Then, those get sorted and sent off to different analytical laboratory machines.
Image: picture alliance/AP Photo/NASA
A tiny predecessor
Curiosity's predecessors were much smaller. On July 4, 1997, the small Mars rover Sojourner left its first tire tracks behind in the dust of the red planet. It was the first time a mobile robot had been left to its own devices there, equipped with an X-ray spectrometer to conduct chemical analyses and with optical cameras.
Image: NASA/JPL
Size comparison
Three rover generations. (The tiny one up front is Sojourner.) At 10.6 kilograms (23 pounds), it's not much bigger than a toy car. Its top speed: 1 centimeter per second. Opportunity weighs 185 kilograms — roughly the equivalent of an electric wheelchair. Curiosity is as big as a small car, at 900 kilograms. The big ones travel up to 4 or 5 centimeters per second.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Almost four months of duty
Sojourner travelled about 100 meters during its lifetime and delivered data and pictures until September 27, 1997. This is one of the last pictures of it, taken nine days before the radio connection broke down. Sojourner probably died because the battery did not survive the cold nights.
Image: NASA/JPL
Paving the way for tomorrow's technology
Without the experience of Sojourner, newer rovers could have hardly been envisaged. In 2004, NASA landed two robots of the same model on Mars: Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit survived for six years, travelling a distance of 7.7 kilometers. The robot climbed mountains, took soil samples and withstood winter and sandstorms. Its sibling, Opportunity, lost contact on February 13, 2019.
Image: picture alliance/dpa
Lots of gadgets
Opportunity passed the marathon distance of 42 kilometers back in 2015, and to this day, it has covered much more ground than Curiosity. It can take ground probes with its arm. It has three different spectrometers and even a 3D camera. It was last operating in "Perseverance Valley," an appropriate workplace for the sturdy robot, before being incapacitated by a sandstorm.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
The red planet's landscapes
This panorama was taken by Curiosity's mast camera. The most modern of the rovers will stay in service as long as possible — hopefully at least another five years. The Martian landscape looks familiar somehow, not unlike some deserts here on Earth. Should we give in to our wanderlust, then — or would it be better leave Mars to the robots?
