The United Arab Emirates plans to make history on Wednesday with the scheduled launch of the “Hope” mission, which will make it the first Arab nation to send a probe to Mars.
A rocket carrying the unmanned spacecraft will take off from Japan’s remote Tanegashima Space Center at 5:51 am local time (2051 GMT Tuesday), although bad weather could delay takeoff until later in a launch window that runs until August 13.
The Emirati project is one of three races to Mars, including Tianwen-1 from China and Mars 2020 from the United States, taking advantage of the period when Earth and Mars are closest: just 55 million km (34 million miles) away.
But unlike the other two companies, the UAE’s Mars probe will not land on the Red Planet.
“Hope”, or Al-Amal in Arabic, is expected to reach Mars orbit in February 2021, marking the 50th anniversary of the unification of the United Arab Emirates, an alliance of seven sheikhs.
Once there, it will travel the planet for a whole Martian year: 687 days.
The probe is expected to separate from the launch rocket about an hour after takeoff, which is when UAE mission deputy project manager Sarah al-Amiri said the real excitement will begin.
“Deep in my heart, I look forward to the first 24 hours after separation, and that’s where we see the results of our work,” said Amiri, who is also the Minister of State for Advanced Sciences.
“It is when we receive the signal for the first time, when we know that every part of the spacecraft is working, when the solar panels are deployed, when we reach our trajectory and head towards Mars,” he told AFP earlier this month.
Keiji Suzuki of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is taking the Hope probe into space, said that with the thunderstorm forecast there were doubts about whether the launch would take place in time.
“The weather is going downhill,” he said during a briefing on Monday. “However, the current forecast is not for severe thunderstorms throughout the process, so our current assessment is that there is a chance of a launch.”
Great ambitions
The United Arab Emirates, best known for its skyscrapers, palm-shaped islands, and mega-attractions, has in recent years been pushing to expand its space sector.
While the goal of the Mars mission is to provide a comprehensive picture of climate dynamics in the Red Planet’s atmosphere and to pave the way for scientific advancements, the probe is the foundation of a much larger goal: to build a human settlement in Mars within the next 100 years
The United Arab Emirates also wants the project to serve as a source of inspiration for Arab youth, in a region that is often affected by sectarian conflict and economic crisis.
Dubai has hired architects to imagine what a Martian city would look like and to recreate it in its desert as “Science City”, at a cost of around 500 million dirhams ($ 135 million).
And last September, Hazza al-Mansouri became the first Emirati in space, part of a three-member crew that took off on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan, returning home after an eight-day mission in which it became the first Arab to visit the International Space Station.
Several dozen probes, most of them American, have been targeting the Red Planet since the 1960s. Many never got that far, or were unable to land.
The drive to explore Mars marked until confirmation, less than 10 years ago, that water once flowed on its surface.
“The unique thing about this mission is that, for the first time, the scientific community around the world will have a holistic view of the Martian atmosphere at different times of the day at different seasons,” said mission project manager Omran Sharaf, at the Monday briefing.
“We have a strategy to contribute to the global effort in the development of technologies and scientific work that will one day help if humanity decides to put a human on Mars.”
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