Launch of UAE’s first interplanetary mission to Mars

This summer, the UAE aims to join the ranks of just a handful of elite countries making space travel around the world by launching its first interplanetary mission to Mars. For the past six years, the small country in the Middle East has worked tirelessly to build a spacecraft that can orbit the Red Planet to study its atmosphere and climate. The mission will now launch on a Japanese rocket.

Known as the Emirates Mars Mission, the project will kick off a busy summer of missions to Mars. Following this launch, China also plans to launch an orbiter, rover, and lander to the Red Planet on July 23. Shortly after that, on July 30, NASA will launch its next rover to Mars, called Perseverance. All of these missions try to take off during a very small window this summer when Earth and Mars get closer to each other in their orbits around the Sun. This planetary alignment only occurs once every two years, so if any of these missions cannot be launch this summer, they will have to wait until 2022 to try again.

For the UAE, launching during this window is very important, as the country is focused on reaching Mars next year. The 50th anniversary of the UAE’s founding is approaching in December 2021, and the UAE wants to celebrate with something big. In late 2013, UAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum asked the nation’s top space engineers to carry out the ambitious space mission by 2021 to commemorate the occasion. “The deadline we had was very, very strict,” says Omran Sharaf, project manager for the Emirates Mars Mission. The edge.

Getting to this point has certainly not been easy. The UAE space program has only been in operation for the past 14 years, and the main focus of the program has been to build and launch Earth-observing satellites. For this mission, UAE space engineers had to design, for the first time, a spacecraft that could handle the tough journey through interplanetary space. And that meant partnering with various academic institutions in the United States to help get the job done. “There was a lot to learn,” says Sharaf. “And the thing is … we didn’t want to start from scratch; we had to learn from others. “

Now the UAE spacecraft named Hope is complete and ready to take off. If all goes well with its launch, it will travel through space for the next seven months and reach Mars in February 2021. After it arrives, it will attempt to orbit around Mars, something that only a handful of four spacecraft International spaces, organizations have been able to achieve this.

A unique mission

Before work could begin in earnest on the mission, the UAE had to decide what their spacecraft would do on Mars. In issuing the challenge, the UAE government specified that the scientific mission should be unique. “One of the goals we had … was to ensure that the science of this mission was complementary to other missions,” says Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, UAE Minister of State for Advanced Sciences. The Verge adding that they wanted to collect data that could help answer scientific questions about Mars that have not been answered by previous missions.

Most of the spacecraft that have been sent to study Mars are tasked with analyzing the planet’s geology by taking high-resolution images of the Martian surface. Only a few Mars satellites are equipped with tools to study the planet’s atmosphere, including NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft and the European Space Agency’s Tracking Gas Orbiter, but no mission has been able to obtain a global view of the atmosphere. Martian closer to the surface.

Image: Emirates Mars Mission

The Hope spacecraft will provide scientists with a better understanding of what is happening in the lower atmosphere of Mars across the planet and help people learn how the climate evolves throughout the year. The UAE is calling Hope as the “first meteorological satellite of Mars” as it will monitor the weather throughout the day in as many places as possible on Mars.

Such a tool could help planetary scientists learn more about extreme events on Mars, such as the global dust storms that sometimes engulf the planet. In 2018, a massive storm took over much of Mars, permanently cutting off communication with NASA’s Opportunity rover. Why does this planet have global dust storms? And why does it last so long? Al Amiri says. “That is one of the other scientific questions that this mission can address now.”

Hope is designed with three instruments to study the Martian atmosphere in detail: two will analyze the planet with infrared and ultraviolet light, while an imager will take visible color images of the planet.

Hope plans to take a highly elliptical path around the red planet. The orbit will bring the spacecraft close to the surface every 55 hours, allowing the vehicle to observe approximately the same parts of the planet at different times of the Martian day. “You can cover all local hours, all areas of Mars, and that gives us the consistency we need to be able to come and say that we cover the day-to-night cycle for Mars,” says Al Amiri.

Associate

The UAE team not only faced a difficult deadline, but also had to meet other strict restrictions to build Hope. The UAE government gave them a fixed budget for the project of just $ 200 million, and the prime minister wanted the engineers to build the spacecraft themselves, not to buy it from someone else. Given all these stipulations, the UAE team knew that they couldn’t do it all on their own.

The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, which built the Hope spacecraft, partnered with the University of Colorado at Boulder, a university that has been designing Martian instruments since the 1960s. Engineers in the United Arab Emirates worked closely with researchers. from UC Boulder every day as if they were all on the same team to design and test the Hope spacecraft. “That’s the only thing about this project,” says Sharaf. “At the end of the day, there were members of the US team reporting to Emirati and I had Emirati reporting to members of the US team.”

The Emiratis also received guidance from researchers at Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley, during the development of the spacecraft. Thanks to these more experienced partnerships, the UAE team was able to build a unique and robust spacecraft without building a completely new infrastructure. To communicate with Hope, the Emiratis will also rely on NASA’s Deep Space Network, an existing array of antennas around the world designed to connect with interplanetary spacecraft.

Image: Emirates Mars Mission

Since Hope is headed so far, it has to be much more reliable and autonomous than any spacecraft the country has ever built before. It can take up to 15 to 20 minutes for a one-way radio signal to reach Mars, depending on where the planet is in its orbit. That means Hope must perform most of its functions on its own, including insertion into the orbit of Mars. When the vehicle reaches Mars, it will have to start its on-board engines for 30 minutes, slowing down from 121,000 kilometers per hour to approximately 18,000 miles per hour. “You go too fast, you crash into Mars,” says Sharaf. “You’re going too slow, it skips [on the atmosphere]; it’s a critical phase in the mission. “

And if the technical challenges weren’t difficult enough, the UAE team had to deal with a pandemic during the final leg for launch. Engineers had to bring the spacecraft to Japan three weeks ahead of schedule to comply with Japan’s quarantine rules. Engineering teams arrived early to go through two-week quarantines before they could receive the spacecraft and eventually help mount the spacecraft on the rocket. “There was a real risk that, after six years of work, we might lose our launch window,” says Sharaf. “It was the last thing we expected to find. The transfer was supposed to be routine and was now mission critical. ”

Providing hope

The UAE team is optimistic that the Hope spacecraft will be able to make significant new discoveries while on Mars. They hope to be able to announce scientific results in time for the country’s 50th anniversary in December.

Image: Emirates Mars Mission

But even before that happens, the Emirates Mars Mission has already had a significant impact on UAE students. One of the biggest motivations for the Hope mission was to inspire Emirati teens to enter STEM fields and make UAE space scientists role models for children. So far, that mission has been a success, and Sharaf says more students have been entering STEM fields than ever before. “We saw students move from international relations and finance to science; We saw universities that didn’t have any science programs, starting science programs, because of the mission, “says Sharaf. “So that ripple effect of the mission and the impact of the mission was actually something we can see and it’s tangible.”

The UAE team hopes to maintain that momentum, but first, Hope has to launch successfully. The spacecraft is scheduled to take off in the early morning on a Japanese H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan on Wednesday July 15 in the country. On the east coast of the United States, takeoff is scheduled for 4:51 PM ET on July 14.

With the launch so close, the team feels a mix of emotions after working so hard on this project after the past six years. “I personally cannot describe them at this time,” says Al Amiri. “You might ask us after launch.”