This summer, it seems like everyone wants to go to Mars.
With three missions launching to the Red Planet in 2020, we at Space.com thought it was time to take stock of humanity's drive to reach Mars. Join us for our "Summer of Mars" webinar as we look at the missions launching this year, how they'll advance the search for life and, possibly, help set the stage for astronauts on Mars.
Registration was free to ask questions via chat (for the first 500 viewers), but we carried the event live on this page, as well as on YouTube and the Space.com homepage.
I'll moderate our discussion, which will begin at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) and last up to an hour. We'll start with NASA's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, which is poised to launch July 30, and discuss the United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter and China's ambitious Tianwen-1, a rover-lander-orbiter combo, both of which launched this week. And there's more missions headed to Mars, like the European-Russian ExoMars mission and Japan's Martian Moons eXploration project.
Our guests:
Jim Watzin: Director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. NASA has invited the public to join its Perseverance Mars launch and "Be a Virtual Guest" of the launch here.
Jim Bell: President of The Planetary Society; principal investigator for Perseverance's MastCam-Z camera system. (For details on how to join the Planetary society, click here.)
I hope you'll join us as it looks to be an exciting discussion. If you miss our live webinar, we'll have a recording of the talk once it concludes.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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