Manama: The first Mars mission from the United Arab Emirates successfully reached the red planet on Tuesday, earning the country as only the fifth nation in history to reach Mars and a first for the Arab world.
The Emirates Mars Mission, kbnown as the Hope Probe, successfully entered orbit on its first attempt.
“Mission accomplished,” UAE’s vice president Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum tweeted as mission control in Dubai celebrated confirmation of the Hope spacecraft’s orbital insertion around Mars at 8.15 pm local time.
Now the country joined an elite club of spacefaring powers that have successfully sent spacecraft to study the fourth planet from the Sun, Mars: the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and India. The UAE is the first country in the Arab world to reach the red planet.
The UAE hopes the mission will yield key discoveries on Martian weather patterns and catalyze a new science and technology sector as it looks to wean its economy from oil dependence.
The probe, along with its three scientific instruments, is expected to create a first complete portrait of the Martian atmosphere. The instruments will collect different data points on the atmosphere to also gauge seasonal and daily changes.
The spacecraft, which crossed 300 million miles, was launched from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center on July 20 last year along with two other missions, Chinese spacecraft Tianwen-1 and NASA’s Perseverance rover. It’s also the first of three Mars spacecraft visiting the planet this month. Tianwen-1 mission has entered orbit around Mars on Wednesday. And NASA’s Perseverance expected to reach 18 of this month.
The timing of the Hope mission was decisive. UAE launched the probe last summer when Earth and Mars aligned at their closest point around the Sun. Such alignment only happens once every two years.
Hope will orbit Mars every 55 hours and capture a complete snapshot every nine days. It is on track to spend two years capturing global snapshots of the planet to better understand its atmosphere and weather changes. The spacecraft will carry out a few more explorations until April to ease into a closer orbit around Mars that offers exceptional local and seasonal time coverage of the Martian atmosphere, the mission’s science lead Hessa Al Matroushi said.
