The United Arab Emirates launched a mission to Mars on Sunday. NASA and China are about to follow with their own rovers, an orbiter, and a helicopter.

• The United Arab Emirates launched a mission to Mars on Sunday.
• NASA and China plan to launch their own by end of July.
• In total, two rovers, two orbiters, and one helicopter will explore Mars after they arrive next year.
• The robots will search for underground water that may harbor alien life, create the first global map of the Martian climate, and drill rock samples that later spacecraft will carry to Earth.
• Here's what the three missions look like and what they aim to do on Mars.

By this time next year, Mars will be abuzz with robotic activity.

That's because three countries are sending spacecraft to the red planet this month. The United Arab Emirates launched its orbiter on a seven-month journey to Mars on Sunday. In the next two weeks, the US and China plan to rocket their own rovers into space.

NASA has sent five rovers to the red planet in the past, but these are China's and the UAE's first attempts.

The robots are expected to make the first global map of the Mars climate, drill into the planet's surface, and search for signs of long-dead microbes that may have once thrived in Martian valleys and riverbeds. These missions could find the first footprints of life on another planet.

The launches are all scheduled for this month in order to catch Mars as it passes close to Earth. If they miss this chance, they won't have another opportunity to launch until 2022.

Russia and the European Space Agency had also planned to send a rover to Mars this year, but had to back out after the coronavirus pandemic caused delays. They'll try again in two years.

Here's what to know about the three new missions to Mars.

NASA's Perseverance rover will stash rock samples to return to Earth

Engineers began assembling Perseverance two years ago at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It was previously called the Mars 2020 rover — a placeholder until NASA chose Perseverance as the winner of a naming competition.

"We as humans evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation, no matter how harsh," Alexander Mather, a 7th-grader from Virginia who proposed the new name, wrote in the essay he submitted to the competition. "We will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere."

NASA has already run into some of those setbacks. It has pushed back the launch date twice, delaying it to July 30. That leaves the agency just two more weeks of flexibility until the launch window closes on August 15.

If all goes well, the rover will land on February 18, 2021 in Mars' Jezero crater — an ancient riverbed that could harbor signs of past microbial life. The mission, which will cost a total $3 billion start-to-finish, will drill into the Martian surface to collect samples of rock and soil, then stash them at a collection point for a future mission to bring back to Earth.

After it lands, the rover is programmed to drop a small helicopter from its belly.

The helicopter, called Ingenuity, is a technology demonstration. If successful, it will conduct the first-ever powered flight on another world.

Perseverance itself will carry a suite of cutting-edge tools: a new navigation system to make landing on the red planet less risky, a machine designed to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide, and instruments to collect data that could help scientists better predict Martian weather.

Together, all these developments could get us closer to putting human boots on Mars's harsh surface.

"We're making history right now," NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said during the announcement of the rover's name. "It will be the first leg of the first round trip of humanity to Mars, bringing back these samples that tell us secrets about life itself."

NASA flew the rover to Cape Canaveral, Florida in February to begin launch preparations.

The Emirates' Hope Probe will create the first global map of Mars's climate

The United Arab Emirates launched its SUV-sized spacecraft from Japan on Sunday just before 6 p.m. ET (Monday morning in Japan).

"Just before the launch, there was pin drop silence," Faraz Javed, a reporter at the UAE's Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, said in a live broadcast of the launch, according to CNET. "Once the rocket took off there were cheers, there was joy. I actually even saw people crying."

The launch was originally scheduled for July 14, but thunderstorms and other unstable weather conditions forced officials to delay it.

The Hope orbiter is the Arab world's first mission to another planet. The probe will join six other spacecraft that orbit Mars — it won't land on the surface. While circling the red planet, the satellite will study the Martian atmosphere by monitoring how it interacts with solar wind and tracking the loss of hydrogen and oxygen.

Hope's goal will be to chart a global map of the planet's climate across an entire Martian year. It would be humanity's first such picture of Mars's atmosphere.

Because of its large, oval-shaped orbit, the probe should be able to capture most of the planet in each of its 55-hour orbits.

"We'll be able to cover all of Mars, through all times of day, through an entire Martian year," Sarah Al Amiri, science lead for the mission and the UAE's minister for advanced sciences, told Nature.

China's rover will search for underground water that could harbor life

After its recent success sending a rover to the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) is taking its space robots to the next planetary body. The mission is called Tianwen-1, meaning "quest for heavenly truth," according to Nature. If successful, it will be the first Mars mission to drop a landing platform, deploy a rover, and send a spacecraft into the planet's orbit all at once.

The rover will be equipped with a radar system that can detect underground pockets of water. It will also help China prepare for its own mission to return a sample from Mars to Earth in the 2030s.

For its first attempt at landing on another planet, China has chosen a relatively hazard-free site at Utopia Planitia, a vast field of volcanic rock, according to The Planetary Society.

Like NASA, the CNSA is planning to launch its Mars mission by the end of July. The intended date is Thursday, July 23, according to reports from Chinese state media cited by the Associated Press.

This story was originally published July 13. It has been updated with new information.