Watch: Mars is about to be invaded by Earth with a fleet of spacecraft from US, China and UAE

Mars is about to be invaded by planet Earth — big time. The U.S., for its part, is dispatching a six-wheeled rover the size of a car, named Perseverance, to collect rock samples that will be brought back to Earth for analysis in about a decade. Each spacecraft will travel more than 300 million miles before reaching Mars next February, It takes six to seven months, at the minimum, for a spacecraft to loop out beyond Earth's orbit and sync up with Mars' more distant orbit around the sun.