The United Arab Emirates will launch its first mission to Mars on Sunday. It will be the first flight from the Arab world to another planet.
The SUV-sized spacecraft, called the Hope probe, will spend seven months traveling to Mars. Once it arrives, Hope will study the red planet’s atmosphere by monitoring how it interacts with the solar wind and tracking its loss of hydrogen and oxygen. Your goal will be to map the planet’s global climate for an entire Martian year.
That would be humanity’s first holistic image of the atmosphere of Mars.
“We will be able to cover all of Mars, throughout the day, for an entire Martian year,” Sarah Al Amiri, mission scientific leader and UAE minister of advanced science, told Nature.
Sarah Amiri, Assistant Project Manager, talks about the project called “Hope” – or “al-Amal” in Arabic – during a ceremony in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, May 6, 2015.
Kamran Jebreili / AP Photo
Due to its large oval orbit, Hope should be able to capture most of the planet in each of its 55-hour orbits.
“The Emiratis were very interested in making this not only a demonstrator of technology, but also in contributing to the scientific understanding of Mars,” Richard Zurek, chief scientist at the Mars Program Office at the Laboratory of Mars, told Nature NASA Jet Propulsion.
The probe was originally scheduled to launch from the Tenaghashima Space Center in Japan on Tuesday, but a poor weather forecast led authorities to delay the flight, a mission spokesperson told Business Insider in an email.
Thunderstorms and other unstable conditions caused further delays. The launch is now scheduled for Sunday at 5:58 p.m. Eastern Time (which is Monday morning in Japan), according to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Japanese launch provider.
UAE Mars Hope probe.
UAE Space Agency
Hope is one of three missions prepared to launch into Mars in the last weeks of July. NASA plans to launch its next Mars rover, called Perseverance, on July 30. China is also preparing to launch a rover, along with its own spacecraft into orbit of Mars, before the end of the month.
The launches are scheduled close together because they must trap Mars as it passes close to Earth in the orbital paths of the planets. If the agencies involved lose this opportunity, they will not have another opportunity to launch until 2022.
If all goes well, the Hope probe will reach Mars in February 2021 and will study the planet from above for two years.
Check out the UAE live stream of the launch below.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will also broadcast the launch live:
Dave Mosher helped report this story.
This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published on July 13, 2020.
