United Arab Emirates successfully launches its first spacecraft bound for Mars

Today, the UAE’s first interplanetary mission successfully took off from the southern tip of Japan, sending a probe the size of a car bound for the planet Mars. The launch marks the beginning of the country’s most ambitious space project so far, aimed at studying the climate on Mars as it evolves throughout the planet’s year.

The spacecraft, called Hope, took off on a Japanese H-IIA rocket from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center at 6:58 a.m. at the launch site (or 5:58 p.m. ET this afternoon on the US east coast. .). The probe will now spend the next seven months traveling through deep space, periodically correcting its course with a series of motor burns. Then, sometime in February 2021, it will attempt to put itself into an elongated orbit around Mars, where it will analyze the atmosphere and climate throughout each Martian day.

For the UAE, the timing of this launch was absolutely critical. The UAE government conceived this project in 2014 to inspire young Emirati teens, and as a bold way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the nation’s founding in December 2021. To ensure Hope is in orbit for the anniversary, the team behind the spacecraft had to launch this summer, during a small window when Earth and Mars approach during their orbits around the Sun. This planetary alignment occurs once every 26 months, so the UAE team had to launch this year to meet the 2021 deadline.

Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP via Getty Images

So far, the launch seems to have been smooth. For a few minutes after the spacecraft deployed from the rocket, engineers feared that the vehicle had not opened one of its two solar panels. But the UAE finally confirmed that both panels had been deployed. The mission team noted that they were in communication with the spacecraft and that Hope appeared to be in good shape. Engineers will continue to analyze data from the spacecraft and provide updates on Hope’s health in the coming hours.

But some in the UAE are already celebrating it. “Years of hard work and dedication have paid off,” Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States, said during a live broadcast after the launch. Thanks to the efforts of the mission team, the UAE’s first spacecraft, which six years ago was just a concept, just an idea, now flies into space on its way to another planet. This is a great achievement. But it’s only the beginning “.

Getting to this point proved to be a particularly challenging process for the UAE, which until now had only experience launching Earth observation satellites. Engineers and scientists had only six years to prepare the probe for launch this year, and their government commissioned them to build the spacecraft themselves, not buy it, within a set budget of $ 200 million for development and launch.

“The government was very clear to us about it: They wanted us to propose a new model for executing such missions and delivering such missions,” Omran Sharaf, project manager for the Emirates Mars Mission, said during a press conference before the launching. “So they didn’t want something with a big, big budget. They wanted something delivered fast, fast, and something that we can share with the rest of the world, about how they can tackle missions. ”

The team behind the mission decided that they finally didn’t want to go it alone. They partnered with various academic institutions in the United States, including the University of Colorado at Boulder, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Berkeley, all of which had experience in designing instruments or equipment for probes in deep space. before. The partnership allowed the UAE team to build on known spacecraft designs and use existing test infrastructure, as well as gain insight from experienced aerospace engineers.

Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP via Getty Images

Today’s launch is a great victory for the UAE and this new model for spacecraft development, but there is still a long way to go before the country’s mission to Mars is declared a success. In about a month, engineers will make the first move to correct Hope’s path to Mars. The vehicle will burn its onboard thrusters, lightly pushing the probe as it moves through space. A series of these maneuvers is needed to ensure Hope reaches the right place on Mars upon arrival. “It’s a very small target,” said Pete Withnell, mission program manager at the University of Colorado Boulder, during a press call before launch. “It is equivalent to an archer hitting a two-millimeter target, one kilometer away. So this is not for the faint of heart. “

And the biggest test of all will come in February, when Hope must burn out her 30-minute thrusters to insert herself into orbit around Mars. The maneuver is intended to reduce the speed of the spacecraft from more than 75,000 miles per hour (121,000 km per hour) to more than 11,000 miles per hour (18,000 km per hour). The spacecraft will have to do all of this on its own, without the intervention of Earth. At that point, it will take too long to send a signal to Mars in time to make any corrections, so the burn must be completely autonomous.

That is still a long way off, and for now, the UAE is celebrating a successful launch. If all goes well, the UAE launch should be the first of three missions to Mars that launch within the net month. The next one is likely to be China, which hopes to launch a Martian orbiter, lander, and scout vehicle to the Red Planet around July 23. After that is NASA, which is launching its Perseverance rover, designed to look for signs of past lives and unearth samples that will potentially be returned to Earth in the next decade for study. All of these groups are running to launch while the planets are aligned, and time is running out to take them all off.