Hope Mars mission
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is preparing a milestone venture to the Red Planet, propelling the country forward in exploration
The United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) was established in 2014 and has evolved exponentially over the last six years. Fast forward to July 2020 and the agency is now preparing to launch its fourth satellite and its first spacecraft to another planet. This mission was dubbed the Emirates Mars Mission, and was later called the Hope Mars Mission. There are many monumental milestones sewed into this mission as the UAE looks to announce itself as a prominent presence within the space exploration industry and in future global scientific efforts.
The nation has been extremely driven in its post-oil economy, which has also been seen in the rapid growth of Dubai’s infrastructure. This is the same drive that is bringing its space agency along leaps and bounds. The country’s main space centre, the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), was established in 2015, and it has since been the workshop for the Hope Mars Mission. This mission will become the first planetary science mission led by an Arab-Islamic country, which the UAE hopes will be the first step in a long and fruitful period of science and exploration. When Hope arrives at Mars in 2021, this event will also coincide with the golden jubilee – or 50th anniversary – of the founding of the UAE.
With this in mind, the nation and its space agency wanted to make this a mission that would have a benefit to all members of science and offer something original. The UAESA reached out to other space agencies and institutions and has created a state-of-the-art weather satellite in collaboration with the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of California, Berkeley, and Arizona State University, all of the United States.
The satellite will carry three scientific instruments – a camera, an infrared spectrometer and an ultraviolet spectrometer – that will paint a clearer picture of the Martian atmosphere, its different layers and how it has evolved from a thicker atmosphere capable of protecting global oceans billions of years ago to the thin, exposing atmosphere that is witnessed today.
The first experiment is the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI). This multi-band – visible and ultraviolet – high-resolution camera aims to image the atmosphere and surface of Mars to a spatial resolution of less than eight kilometres (five miles), in order to measure dust, water ice and ozone abundance in the atmosphere. This camera will return beautiful images of the Red Planet through the lens of a historic Arab mission, giving us stunning views of the planet next door.
The other two experiments consist of the Emirates Mars InfraRed Spectrometer (EMIRS) and the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS). The EMIRS experiment, in collaboration with Arizona State University, will track temperature patterns as well as identifying the ice, water vapour and dust configuration in the atmosphere. As for EMUS, this experiment will monitor changes in the thermosphere, which is one of the outermost layers of an atmosphere. This will study how hydrogen and oxygen is lost to space via the thermosphere. It will also monitor the exosphere and how it changes with the seasons.
At the time of writing the spacecraft is due to launch from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center,
riding on a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket, on 14 July 2020 (UTC). This has not been smooth sailing by any means, especially during the midst of a global pandemic. “The challenges overcome by the Hope team amidst the global pandemic confirm the UAE mission’s commitment to achieve the impossible,” says Sarah bint Yousif Al-Amiri, minister of state for advanced sciences and the mission’s deputy project manager. “It is a mentality that has now been embedded within the current and future generations. This mission embodies the nation’s aspirations, sends a positive message to the world and demonstrates the importance of carrying on unabated despite barriers and challenges.”
The UAE has a tremendous amount of hope for this appropriately named mission. It has been referred to as the “Arab world’s version of President John F. Kennedy’s moonshot” by Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the US. By this he means that it will inspire a new generation of scientists, astronomers, geologists, astrobiologists and so many more in the same way the Apollo missions have inspired our current crop of outstanding minds. In fact, the UAE has set out on an outrageously ambitious endeavour that it refers to as the ‘Mars 2117 project’. The overall aim is to pioneer the first inhabitable human settlement on Mars by the year 2117 – this will begin with the science and collaboration brought about by the Hope mission.