An Emirati passes in front of a screen showing the Mars “Hope” probe at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai on July 19, 2020, before its planned launch from Japan. The probe is one of three races to the Red Planet, with Chinese and American rockets also taking advantage of Earth and Mars being unusually close: a mere 55 million km (34 million mile) jump.
CACACIA DE GIUSEPPE | AFP via Getty Images
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates: The United Arab Emirates successfully launched its Mars probe, called Hope, which made history as the first interplanetary mission in the Arab world.
“We are taking off. H2A, the rocket carrying the Hope probe into space, was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan,” the official Hope Mars Mission mission tweeted Monday morning. “The Hope probe is the culmination of every step humans have taken throughout history to explore the unknown depths of space.”
Hope launched from the Japanese space center on Sunday, after being delayed the previous week due to bad weather conditions. Within hours of takeoff, the ground segment at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai established two-way communication with the probe.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover tweeted to the Hope mission: “Congratulations on your launch! I wish you a successful journey and look forward to the sun when we are both exploring Mars.”
The Hope probe, a $ 200 million project called “Al Amal” in Arabic, is slated to reach Mars orbit in February 2021 and will spend a year on Mars, equivalent to 687 days on Earth, studying and collecting data. over the atmosphere of the red planet. The year 2021 is also significant: it will mark 50 years of the UAE’s existence.
“It is a meteorological satellite, and that is one of the mission’s objectives,” Sarah al-Amiri, chief scientist for the Mars mission and the UAE’s state minister for advanced science, told Spaceflight Now. “We also look at what role the climate of Mars plays in atmospheric loss. That is the other part of the mission.”
The Emirates Mars Mission partnered with a team from the University of Colorado Boulder to build the spacecraft, drawing on the experience of the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. But the small Gulf country has spent years investing in space research and development, founding its own space agency in 2014 after launching satellites in 2009 and 2013 developed jointly with partners in South Korea.
The United States and China are also launching their own missions to Mars, which are expected to reach the planet’s orbit at the same time as the Hope probe, this summer, due to a specific time window that occurs once every two years, where Mars and Earth are closer.
The UAE government has launched several campaigns to expand the country’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) sector, and regards its growing space program as an important part of that. It is also the first country in the world to have an artificial intelligence minister, and is investing heavily in its own indigenous defense industry.
Some 200 Emirati engineers and scientists spent six years working on the first spacecraft in the Arab world. NASA Administrator Jim Bridestine tweeted, “Congratulations to the team that worked on @HopeMarsMission. It is truly amazing what @UAESpaceAgency and @MBRSpaceCentre have accomplished in such a short time.”
“The Emirates have successfully launched the first interplanetary mission in the Arab world, beginning a journey of 493 million kilometers (306 million miles) to Mars,” said Ahmad Al Falasi, president of the United Arab Emirates Space Agency and minister of state. education, he said in a statement. “This is a breakthrough for the UAE’s ambitious space program. The Emirates Mars Mission is a catalyst that has already served to significantly accelerate the development of the UAE’s space, education, science and technology sectors.”
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