Summer on Mars: NASA’s Perseverance Rover Is One of Three Missions Ready to Launch

If space exploration was a popularity contest, Mars would be struggling for admirers. Once the darling of 20th-century planetary scientists, the world’s allure has cooled somewhat as other exciting locales—the woefully unexplored Venus, for example, or Saturn’s thrilling moon Titan—begin to turn more heads. But Mars is not relinquishing its time in the limelight quite yet. This summer, three new missions are launching to the Red Planet—and at least one of them could reinvigorate interest in Mars with a renewed search for life there.