admin On Sunday, The UAE successfully launched its Mars-bound Hope Probe, marking the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission — and the first of three international missions to the Red Planet.
Due to bad weather, The Hope Probe took off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, after a delay last week. The solid rocket booster successfully detached from the launch vehicle, and the probe has established two-way communication with the ground segment in Dubai.
The Al Amal probe, as it is called in Arabic, is predicted to reach Mars by February 2021. It will be the first time the UAE has orbited Mars, and the probe will stay in orbit for a Martian year which is equivalent to 687 days on Earth, to collect data about Mars’ atmosphere.
“It’s an honor to be part of the global efforts to explore deep space,” The official Hope Mars Mission account after the launch twitted. “The Hope Probe is the culmination of every single step that humans have taken throughout history to explore the unknown depths of space.”
The US and China are also embarking on Mars missions this summer. NASA’s Perseverance Rover and China’s Tianwen 1 are predicted to launch sometime between late July and early August, however the exact date will depend on daily launch conditions.
These three countries are all launching this summer because of the occurrence of a biennial window when Earth and Mars are closest together, making the journey a little bit shorter.
NASA tweeted: “I wish you a successful journey and look forward to the sol when we are both exploring Mars … I cannot wait to join you on the journey!”
The UAE has launched satellites before in 2009 and 2013, but they were developed with South Korean partners. The country founded its space agency in 2014, and has set ambitious targets including a colony on the Martian surface by 2117.
Government officials have earlier pronounced of the space program as a catalyst for the country’s growing STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) sector.
Just making it this far was an extraordinary feat for the Gulf country. UAE scientists had taken just six years to carry out the project.
They partnered with a team in the US to build the spacecraft, at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. And to find a novel science objective for Hope’s mission, they consulted the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), a forum created by NASA to plan explorations of Mars.
Sarah Al Amiri, the mission’s science lead said, they decided to use Hope to build the first full picture of Mars’ climate throughout the Martian year.
“The data gathered by the probe will add a new dimension to the human knowledge,” twitted Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, on Twitter. “This is our latest contribution to the world.”
Al Amiri said, studying Mars’ weather system, including changes in the atmosphere and climate, could help lead to an understanding of how Mars — a planet that used to share characteristics with Earth — went from having rivers and lakes to having no water on its surface. To piece together the puzzle, the probe will aim to take a variety of measurements, allowing to explore different theories, he added.
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