Hope Mars probe heads for red planet after perfect image launch

The United Arab Emirates has taken a historic first step towards interplanetary exploration, with the launch of the First Arab world mission to Mars. The Hope, or Al Amal, spacecraft departed from Earth from Tanegashima, Japan, with the help of a Mitsubishi rocket on Sunday afternoon, shortly before 3 p.m. PT.

As with all rocket launches, it started with a countdown. But like many aspects of the mission, the countdown also made history. The last 10 seconds before launch were broadcast in Arabic for the first time. The mission was not without its problems earlier in the week, when the weather in Japan forced to delay launch twice. And a bigger problem plagued Hope’s development: the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic loomed over the mission.

“The pandemic was not something we had on the show,” Fahad Al Mehri, executive director of the space sector at the UAE space agency, said during a live broadcast. “It is not something we can manipulate ourselves into.”

But the pandemic became a lingering thought and the skies cleared for launch on Sunday. At 2:58 pm PT / 1:58 am UAE time on Monday, the Mitsubishi rocket made its perfect exit from the Tanegashima Space Center.

“Just before launch, there was silence from pin drop,” Faraz Javed, a reporter for the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, said during a live broadcast. “Once the rocket took off there were cheers, there was joy, I even saw people crying.”

The rocket pierced blue into the upper layers of the atmosphere, and the first-stage impellers separated cleanly. At around 3:55 p.m. Pacific time, the Hope probe separated from the Mitsubishi rocket rocket to receive applause from the launch center in Japan. The separation put the car-sized probe into a transfer orbit that will now take it about 500 million kilometers (310 million miles) to the red planet.

As long as the journey is smooth, the probe will reach Mars in about seven months and soon after will begin its first observations.

The spacecraft is intended to reside in the orbit of Mars to “study the dynamics of the Martian atmosphere on a global scale and on daytime and seasonal time scales,” according to the website of the United Arab Emirates Agency of the Space Agency. the United Arab Emirates. The probe is also equipped to take high-resolution photos of the red planet.

While large agencies like NASA, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos tend to grab attention, the UAE Space Agency is helping to demonstrate that there is room for smaller programs to make their mark on space exploration.

Hope is one of several missions aiming to launch into a window of opportunity when Earth and Mars are in optimal positions with each other. POT hopes to follow suit with his Perseverance rover in late July, while China is also ready to send its own orbiter and rover on the Tianwen-1 mission at the end of this month.

If these missions go as scheduled, it will be a busy February for observers on Mars. Hope has earned the distinction of being the first of the three to begin the epic journey.