In this month of July, the road to Mars is (almost) as crowded as that of going on vacation. After the Emirati probe Al-Amal, on July 20, and its Chinese counterpart Tianwen-1, on July 23, it is the American robot Perseverance which is to take the direction of the red planet on Thursday. The latter must go in search of possible traces of life on Mars. A few days before this latest launch, the European Space Agency (ESA) made public on Monday the results of the observations of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) probe.
Conceived jointly in 2016 by ESA and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos, its mission is to study the gases present in the Martian atmosphere. One gas in particular is the subject of special attention: methane. Unfortunately, after a Martian year of observation (around 687 days), mission scientists saw no sign of it.
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