UAE joy as Hope probe enters Mars orbit after near miss
THE United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe last night successfully entered Mars’s orbit after a nail-biting journey that could have ended with the spacecraft crashing into the planet or missing it altogether.
Emirati scientists cheered as news of the success was broadcast. The Hope probe – or ‘Amal’ in Arabic – is a source of immense national pride for the UAE, which is the first Arab state to launch an interplanetary space mission.
“To the people of the UAE, to the Arab and Muslim nations, we announce the successful arrival to Mars orbit. Praise be to God,” said Omran Sharaf, the mission’s project manager.
As it approached Mars, the spacecraft fired its main engines for nearly half an hour in an intricate manoeuvre that slowed down the probe so it could be captured by the planet’s gravitational pull.
For several agonising minutes it was unclear whether the mission had succeeded, due to the time delay in relaying signals.
Then, as ground controllers received confirmation that the craft had entered orbit, they rose to their feet and broke into applause.
The team, which has an average age of just 27 due to the UAE’s young population, will have found the ordeal extraordinarily tense – around 60pc of Mars missions end in failure.
The Hope’s mission launch in July was only made possible by a rare, close alignment between Earth and Mars.
The spacecraft is roughly the same size as a car, cost $200m (€160m) to build and was developed in Boulder, Colorado, before it was sent to the launchpad in Japan.
The UAE team collaborated with the University of Colorado, the University of California, Berkeley, and Arizona State University.
“It was a dream that we never dared to dream, because we didn’t think it was possible for the UAE to have a space programme, let alone to send a spacecraft to Mars,” Sarah Al Amiri, the Emirati advanced science minister, said in an interview last year.