Last month with Nasa’s Perseverance rover, China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter, we Earthlings reached out to our neighbour planet, Mars.

The arrival of so many missions at one time is no coincidence. A rocket to Mars is just a body we’ve set into orbit around the Sun whose elongated path starts at Earth and loops out to Mars. If it didn’t stop at Mars, it would orbit back around to the point where it was launched. Of course by the time it returned, Earth would have moved on in its own orbit around the Sun. And likewise it takes careful timing to find Mars itself arriving in its orbit at just the same place where the spacecraft reaches its orbit’s outermost point. The proper alignment of these planets occurs once every two years; February 2021 was one of the magic moments.

These missions (and past launches from Russia, India, Japan and the European Space Agency) are designed to show off each nation’s technology. But they also reveal a hunger to explore that is common to all human beings; the curiosity that causes a baby to find its toes, and react with glee at the presence of another baby.