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What you will learn in Mars Exploration

1. Why Mars
Mars and Earth on the same axes: half the radius, a tenth of the mass, and an atmosphere the chart prints as 0.0064 bar against Earth's 1.0140. Close enough to reach, and different enough to have lost something.
2. Getting there
Earth and Mars line up for a transfer once every 780 days, and the widget computes that from two orbital periods and nothing else. Miss the window and the next one is 2.1 years away, which is why a slipped Mars mission slips by two years.
3. The rovers
Opportunity was built to drive a kilometre in 90 sols and drove 45.16 km in more than five thousand. Curiosity drove 38 km to end up 14 km from where it landed, a kilometre higher. Every line on the map is the mission's own record of where the rover stopped.
4. Living on Mars time
A sol is 88 775.244 seconds — 39 minutes 35 seconds longer than an Earth day, and a whole day out of phase every 36.4 sols. Every sol count on the page is a subtraction rather than a stored integer, and the reason is that a stored one is wrong tomorrow.
5. Bringing samples home
Perseverance seals rock in titanium tubes and has left ten of them on the ground at a place called Three Forks — nine samples and a witness tube, a backup copy of what it still carries. The return trip is being re-planned, and this chapter gives it no date because none is credible.

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1. Why Mars
Mars and Earth on the same axes: half the radius, a tenth of the mass, and an atmosphere the chart prints as 0.0064 bar against Earth's 1.0140. Close enough to reach, and different enough to have lost something.
2. Getting there
Earth and Mars line up for a transfer once every 780 days, and the widget computes that from two orbital periods and nothing else. Miss the window and the next one is 2.1 years away, which is why a slipped Mars mission slips by two years.
3. The rovers
Opportunity was built to drive a kilometre in 90 sols and drove 45.16 km in more than five thousand. Curiosity drove 38 km to end up 14 km from where it landed, a kilometre higher. Every line on the map is the mission's own record of where the rover stopped.
4. Living on Mars time
A sol is 88 775.244 seconds — 39 minutes 35 seconds longer than an Earth day, and a whole day out of phase every 36.4 sols. Every sol count on the page is a subtraction rather than a stored integer, and the reason is that a stored one is wrong tomorrow.
5. Bringing samples home
Perseverance seals rock in titanium tubes and has left ten of them on the ground at a place called Three Forks — nine samples and a witness tube, a backup copy of what it still carries. The return trip is being re-planned, and this chapter gives it no date because none is credible.