The first of three new visitors to Mars will arrive on Tuesday in a parade when the first international mission conducted by the Arab nation called Hope Robotics is about to enter orbit.
For the people of the United Arab Emirates, getting there has become a source of pride. Over the weekend, a number of prominent buildings and monuments in the oil-rich country, which are about the size of silence, were lit in red in honor of the red planet Mars.
Omran Sharaf, Hope’s project manager, said that from the UAE government’s point of view, basically 90 per cent of the mission has been achieved successfully.
For the remaining 10 percent, the spacecraft still has a lot to do to implement the instructions already loaded on its computer but wait.
Sarah al-Amiri, who heads the science portion of the mission, said she felt a lot of emotion when the spacecraft was launched during the summer. But now that it’s closer to Mars, “this will make them more intense,” he said.
Once in orbit, the spacecraft can begin studying the atmosphere and weather of the Red Planet.
But if the spacecraft misses Mars due to a problem and leaves for the Solar System, it will probably be the end of this mission. “If you don’t reach, you won’t reach,” Ms. Al-Amiri said.
Col., where the emirate was tested, said Bruce Jakowski, associate director of atmospheric and space physics at the laboratory in Boulder, said the mission’s administrators had planned for a variety of scenarios.
“If something goes wrong, the team is with him and will try its best to recover from it,” he told the Dubai One TV network on Tuesday.
At 7:42 pm on Tuesday in the UAE – 10:42 am – controllers at the Mission Operations Center in Dubai heard the sound of the spacecraft saying it had started firing its thrusters to slow itself down and let it enter the entrance. Mars gravity.
Because it would take 11 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Mars to Earth, the thyristor firing would actually start 11 minutes earlier, and if something went wrong, it would be too late.
The UAE’s space agency will broadcast online coverage of the maneuver at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. Or you can watch it in the video player above.
After twenty minutes of power, the thrusters will go off. Five minutes after the firing ended, the spacecraft will pass behind Mars and will not be in contact for 15 minutes. When it re-emerges, controllers can confirm whether it is zipping up the high elliptical path around Mars.
The goal is to spend two years studying how dust storms and other weather conditions close to the surface affect the speed at which Martian air is escaping into outer space.
A day after the Hope maneuver, the Chinese spacecraft, Tianwen-1, will also enter orbit around Mars. The Chinese mission is carrying a lander and rover to explore a large impact basin called Utopia Planetia, but it will not detach from the orbiter and go to the surface until May.
Then next week on Thursday NASA’s latest rover, Perseverance will also arrive on Mars. Without entering the first orbit, it would instead descend rapidly to the surface of Mars at 12,000 miles an hour, which NASA calls “seven minutes of terror.”
The target of patience is the Jezero Crater, a dried up lake that seems to be a place where a sign of life can be saved if life is produced on Mars.
All three launched missions last July to take advantage of the favorable alignment between Earth and Mars, which takes place every 26 months.
While NASA has decades of experience launching spacecraft to other planets and China has successfully sent a series of robotic missions to the moon in recent years, the UAE is a newcomer to planetary science.
The Hope Mission is an unusual collaboration between the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, a research institute at the University of Colorado in the United Arab Emirates that has been working on space missions for more than half a century.
Although the spacecraft was built in Colorado, many UAE engineers stayed there for years and gained expertise as they worked with their more experienced American counterparts.
Ms Al-Amiri said the mission has also generated widespread interest in space, with questions from the UAE asking why delays in communication between Earth and Mars and why it is difficult to enter orbit.
“Science has been excellent for communicating with the general public and gaining insights into the field, which has been overlooked not only across the country, but also in this field,” she said. Al-Amiri said. “It wasn’t like he was the subject of conversation.”
The UAE also does not have rockets or launching pads, so the Hope spacecraft went to Japan to take its place, launching in July on an H-IIA rocket built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Limited.
In the seven months that followed, the spacecraft weighed 30,000 million miles, weighing about 1,000 pounds and about the size of an SUV. The mission controllers were able to skip the two final planned course improvements, as the spacecraft remained right on target.
Along the way, the spacecraft was able to make some bonus science observations. In one, Hope and Bepi Colombo, a joint European-Japanese spacecraft on their way to Mercury, collided and made similar measurements of hydrogen between the two spacecraft. This should help scientists working on both missions to calibrate their devices as well as learn some new information about the solar system.
Attempted to track inter-dust dust in another set of observations.
“The opportunity presented itself, and we know that these data sets are extremely rare for scientists studying this type of science, and so, we hope to release it soon and benefit the community,” Ms. Al-Amiri said.
