UAE to become first Arab nation to head to Mars

Of Red planet in 2000 to The Martian In 2015, the deserts of the Middle East were a favorite filming location for Hollywood productions aiming to replicate the Martian landscape. Now, however, in a development of a summer box office hit, the UAE is trying to become the first Arab country to launch a mission to Earth’s closest neighbor, with the probe scheduled for takeoff this month. Al Amal (Hope) unmanned, atop a Mitsubishi H-IIA rocket, from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center. A new launch date has been set for Friday, but according to the mission’s official Twitter account, unstable weather conditions on Tanegashima Island have now forced an additional postponement. The launch window runs through August 13. “The UAE is one of the fastest – it is growing in space powers and has ambitious plans for space science and planetary exploration,” Dr. Malcolm Davis, senior analyst for strategy and defense capacity at the Institute, told The Media Line. of Australian Strategic Policy in Canberra. “I think if this mission goes well, it will encourage them to do more, which is great news,” he said. The United States and China are also taking advantage of a biennial event in which Mars and Earth are at their closest point, at a distance of 34 million miles. Both will launch missions this summer: Tianwen-1 from China and Mars 2020 from the US Both companies will land on the surface of the Red Planet, while the Emirates mission is to orbit the equator for a full Martian year (almost two years). terrestrial), studying the climate and the atmosphere. Is there room in today’s world space race for smaller nations like the United Arab Emirates to overcome their weight?The Al Amal (Hope) probe is being prepared at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center. (UAE Space Agency)“Due to the increased availability of technology, space is becoming much more democratized,” Sam Wilson, project engineer at the Space Policy and Strategy Center at the California-based Aerospace Corporation, told The Media Line. “In contrast to the past, when space was dominated by the United States and Russia, many more countries get involved,” he noted. As of 2019, more than 60 countries had a national space budget and more than 70 satellites of their own or operated already in orbit, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Scientists at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai took just six years to complete the Emirates Mars Mission project. between next January and March, scheduled to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Gulf country. “The UAE space program is ambitious, perhaps even too ambitious to achieve on its established schedule,” Colin Ruther Ford, program manager for the aviation firm Lockheed Martin, told The Media Line in a personal capacity. “But that ambition also drove [it] from a relatively insular and underdeveloped country in the 1970s to the global nation that it is today. “For more articles visit themedialine.org