The United Arab Emirates’ Hope mission yielded its first picture of Mars.
The spacecraft orbited the Red Planet on Tuesday, making the United Arab Emirates the first Arab nation in history to be scientifically present at its nearest neighbor.
This first image will be followed by many similar views of Mars.
Hope has been placed in a wide orbit so that it can study the weather and climate systems of the planet, which means that it will also see the full disk of the planet.
It is a type of view familiar with telescopes on Earth, but less so of satellites actually positioned on Mars.
They are usually kept close to the planet so that they can get a high resolution of the surface and act as telecommunication relay stations for land robots in contact with the earth.
The photo at the top of this page was captured by Hope’s EXI instrument at an altitude of 24,700 km (15,350 miles) above the surface of Mars at 20:36 GMT on Wednesday – so one day after you arrive at the Red Planet has.
The North Pole of Mars is at the top left in the image. In the middle, just in the early morning sunlight, is Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system. Look straight at the boundary between night and day, the so-called terminator.
The three shield volcanoes in a line are Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons. Look east, at the limb of the planet, and you see the mighty gorge system, Valles Marineris. It is partly covered by cloud.
“The transmission of the first image of Mars’ Hope Probe is a turning point in our history and indicates that the UAE is involved with advanced countries involved in space exploration,” the mission’s twitter account mentioned. “We hope this mission will lead to new discoveries about Mars that will benefit humanity.”
Hope now runs in an initial ellipse around Mars that comes as close as 1,000 km from the planet and extends to almost 50,000 km. Over the next few weeks, it will be completed to a 55-hour track, 22,000 km by 43,000 km, which is inclined about 25 degrees to the equator.
From this high seat, Hope plans to do new research. It will follow how energy moves from the bottom to the top through the atmosphere.
One of its aims is to study the leakage of neutral hydrogen and oxygen atoms in space – remnants of Mars’ once abundant water. This will contribute to our understanding of exactly how a previously hot and wet planet became the cold, dusty, dehydrated world it is today.
On the day that the United Arab Emirates probe took this first image, the Chinese Tianwen-1 orbit arrived at Mars.
Like Hope, it had to perform a brake mode to make sure it was captured by the planet’s gravity.
The Tianwen-1 mission carries a rover that will be sent to the surface in May or June.
China’s space agency has released earlier images of what its satellite saw during the insertion of an orbit.
These photos do not come from a science camera like Hope’s EXI instrument, but from low – resolution cameras used by engineers to inspect the spacecraft.
In the film below, the view is dominated by the solar panel of Tianwen-1, but the atmosphere of Mars and the topography of the surface are clearly visible.
The next week is the turn of the Americans. Their Perseverance Rover reaches Mars on Thursday and will immediately attempt to land in a nearby equatorial crater called Jezero.