UAE has launched its first interplanetary mission to Mars, named as Hope on Sunday (July 19) at 5:58 p.m. EDT (2158 GMT). Hope has blasted off from a Japanese rocket, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket from Tanegashima Space Center. For the last six years, the small middle-east company has tirelessly worked to build a spacecraft that can orbit the Red Planet to study the weather and atmosphere.
The $200 million Hope mission, also called the Emirates Mars Mission, is the UAE’s first foray into interplanetary exploration, and its arrival was expecting on February 2020, designed to mark on the nation’s 50th anniversary. Specifically, mission planners needed an undertaking that would launch the country’s technology and science segments as the nation searches for an economic model that can continue it past its oil wealth.
The mission planners wanted to project that this Emirates Mars Mission would be an encouragement to the Nations technology and science sector, as the country looks for an economic model that will sustain beyond its wealth.
Getting to this point has certainly not been easy. The UAE’s space program has only been in operation for the last 14 years, and the program’s main focus has been building and launching satellites to observe Earth. For this mission, UAE’s space engineers had to design, for the first time, a spacecraft that could handle the harsh journey through interplanetary space. And that meant partnering with various academic institutions in the US to help get the job done.
Hope will travel through space for the next seven months and reach Mars in February 2021. After it arrives, it will attempt to insert itself into orbit around Mars, something only a handful of spacecraft from four international space organizations has been able to achieve. Mission scientists have consulted the Mars scientists around the world and concluded a feasible way to achieve the ultimate goal, to gather the comprehensive data of the Martian atmosphere in all its complexity.
A UNIQUE MISSION
The Hope spacecraft will give scientists a better understanding of what’s happening in Mars’ lower atmosphere all over the planet and help people learn how the weather evolves throughout the year. The UAE is hailing Hope as “Mars’ first weather satellite” since it will monitor the weather throughout the day in as many locations as possible on Mars.
Hope has equipped with three different instruments, mainly an imager and two spectrometer- infrared spectrometer and ultraviolet spectrometer.
The imager will provide you the detailed images of the Mar’s surface and the combination of the imager and spectrometer gather the data and allows the scientists to track the ingredients located the Mars atmosphere. Such a tool could help planetary scientists learn more about the extreme events on Mars, such as the global dust storms that sometimes engulf the planet.
Hope is the first of the three Mars missions scheduled to launch over the coming two weeks. China is expecting next to launch on Mars mission, Tianwen-1, which consists of an orbiter, lander, and rover, on July 23. NASA will launch its Mars 2020 mission, on an Atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the rover Perseverance, on July 30
On this three Mars Mission, China will be the next to launch the docket with a mission called Tianwen-1 on July 23, 2020. The main aim is to tackle the questions on the Red Planets’ geology and environment. This mission includes an orbiter, land, and a rover.
Then, Nasa Mars 2020 mission, carrying with a Mars rover perseverance on July or August. The perseverance is to finds the signs of past microbial life on the Mars environment. The perseverance is a massive six-wheeled rover carrying a tiny helicopter, thereby will become the first aircraft to fly on another planet.