An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing on Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech

• NASA, China, and the United Arab Emirates each have a mission speeding towards Mars — all set to arrive in February.
• NASA’s Perseverance rover is equipped to sniff out signs of alien life, while China’s Tianwen-1 rover could find underground water.
• The UAE’s Hope orbiter aims to make a global map of the Martian climate.

The missions – from NASA, China, and the United Arab Emirates – are set to reach the red planet this month, either falling into orbit around Mars or landing on its dusty red surface. Once there, they aim to search for signs of alien life, scan for underground reservoirs of water, and map the planet’s changing seasons.The three space agencies’ missions all launched in July 2020. Their timelines align because they are taking advantage of the same short window of time when Mars passes close to Earth in the planets’ orbits around the sun. That significantly reduces the travel time and cost of anything launched toward Mars.

After six months of careening through space, three sets of robots finally have Mars in their sights.