The UAE is hopeful that it will finally be able to start its mission to Mars in the next few hours.
Japan will launch the Hope probe for the UAE, on an H2-A rocket from the remote Tanegashima spaceport.
The weather has thwarted two previous attempts in the past week, but conditions now seem set for the new takeoff time scheduled at 06:58 Japan time, Monday (22:58 BST, Sunday).
The mission aims to study the climate and climate of the red planet.
On its 500 million kilometer journey, the robotic spacecraft will arrive in February 2021, in time for the 50th anniversary of the UAE’s formation.
Hope is one of three missions that will launch to Mars this month. The United States and China have surface rovers in the final stages of preparation.
Why is the UAE going to Mars?
The United Arab Emirates has limited experience in designing and manufacturing spacecraft, and yet here it is trying something that only the US, Russia, Europe, and India have managed to do. But it speaks to the ambition of the Emiratis that they should dare to take up this challenge.
Its engineers, guided by American experts, have produced a sophisticated probe in just six years, and when this satellite reaches Mars, it is expected to provide new science, revealing new ideas about how the planet’s atmosphere works.
In particular, scientists think it may increase our understanding of how Mars lost much of its air and, with it, much of its water.
The Hope probe is widely regarded as an inspirational vehicle, something that will attract more young people in the Emirates and across the Arab region to study science at school and higher education.
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The satellite is one of several projects that, according to the UAE government, signals its intention to move the country away from dependence on oil and gas and towards a future based on a knowledge economy.
But as always when it comes to Mars, the risks are high. Half of all missions sent to the Red Planet have ended in failure. Hope project director Omran Sharaf acknowledges the dangers but insists his country is right to try.
“This is a research and development mission and, yes, failure is an option,” he told BBC News.
“However, not progressing as a nation is not an option. And what matters most here is the ability and capacity that the UAE gained from this mission, and the knowledge that it brought to the country.”
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MBRSC
Robotic probe: Hope has taken six years to develop
How has the UAE managed to do this?
The UAE government told the project team that it could not buy the spacecraft from a large foreign corporation; had to build the satellite itself.
This meant partnering with American universities that had the necessary experience. Engineers and scientists from Emirati and the United States worked together to design and build the spacecraft systems and the three instruments on board that will study the planet.
While much of the manufacturing of the satellite occurred at the University of Colorado Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory (LASP), Boulder, considerable work was also done at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) in Dubai.
Brett Landin of LASP believes that the Emiratis are now in a great place to do another mission on their own.
“I could give you the process to power a spacecraft, but until you put on an escape suit and transfer 800kg of highly volatile rocket fuel from the storage tanks to the spacecraft, you really don’t know what it is like,” said the senior. systems engineer said.
“Their propulsion engineers have done it and they know how to do it the next time they build a spacecraft.”
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ESA / DLR / FU Berlin
Surface characteristics indicate that Mars once had plenty of running water
What science will Hope do on Mars?
The Emiratis did not want to do science “to me too”; they did not want to appear on the Red Planet and repeat measurements that had already been made by others. They then went to an advisory committee of the US space agency (NASA) called the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) and asked what research a UAE probe could add to the current state of knowledge.
MEPAG’s recommendations framed Hope’s goals. In one line, the UAE satellite will study how energy moves through the atmosphere, from the bottom up, at all times of the day and during all seasons of the year.
It will track features like high dust that on Mars greatly influences the temperature of the atmosphere.
It will also analyze what happens to the behavior of neutral hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the upper part of the atmosphere. There is a suspicion that these atoms play an important role in the continued erosion of the Mars atmosphere by energetic particles that flow away from the Sun.
This plays with the story of why the planet is now losing most of the water it clearly had at the beginning of its history.
To gather her observations, Hope will take a quasi-equatorial orbit away from the planet at a distance of 22,000 km to 44,000 km.
“The desire to see every piece of real estate at any time of the day ended up making the orbit very large and elliptical,” explained the leader of the core scientific team at Hope, David Brain of LASP.
“By making those decisions, for example, we will be able to fly over Olympus Mons (the largest volcano in the Solar System) as Olympus Mons moves through different times of the day. And at other times, we will let Mars rotate below us.
“We will get full disk images of Mars, but our camera has filters, so we will do science with those images, getting global views with different goggles, if you like.”
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