Tomorrow, the history and hope of the Arab world will depend on the endurance and independence of six engines charged with steering an SUV-sized spacecraft into orbit March.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has launched the spacecraft, named Hope, in July 2020, with an increase in its first interplanetary mission a little over a decade after it became a space-based nation at all. Now, after a smooth seven-month voyage, the UAE is preparing Hope’s arrival at the Red Planet on 9 February. It is a complex maneuver that requires the spacecraft to complete a fierce engine burn without the support of the mission’s engineers, anxiously awaiting bulletins that delay the solar system’s geometry by ten minutes.
“What this means is 27 minutes of fuel, the use of our propellers, of the spacecraft which is one of the most difficult challenges for which it was designed,” said Sarah Al Amiri, chairwoman of the UAE space agency, during a virtual event presented on February 1 by the US-UAE Business Council, a non-profit organization in Washington, DC
Related: United Arab Emirates’ Hope mission to Mars in photos
Questions and answers: Why the arrival of the UAE mission of the UAE is ‘super exciting’
Book of Mars: $ 22.99 by Magazines Direct
Explore the mysteries of Mars within 148 pages. With the latest generation of robbers, landers and orbits on their way to the Red Planet, we are discovering even more of this world’s secrets than ever before. Discover the landscape and its formation, discover the truth about water on Mars and the search for life, and explore the possibility that the fourth rock of the sun may one day be our next home.
Mars Orbit Insertion, which will be called a milestone tomorrow, will make the Hope team possible focus on science while the UAE becomes the fifth entity to orbit the Red Planet. (NASA, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency and India preceded it; China will only launch a day later with its Tianwen-1 mission.)
“The UAE has led the Arab world to new frontiers in deep space for the first time in history,” said Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and ruler of the Dubai Emirate. a statement said. “Our space mission carries a message of hope and trust in the Arab youth.”
Hope is a mission for the demographically dominated youth in the UAE and the Middle East, Al Amiri stressed during the spacecraft’s journey. “Youth are being used and radicalized in the region,” she said. “People just wanted opportunities and wanted to be able to apply themselves positively for growth.”
Related: The UAE wants to rewrite what we know about the weather on Mars
Space exploration evoked an attractive rally. “This is what space is about; it takes the context of the nationality background out of it,” Al Amiri said. “You become a species more than anything else.”
And while Hope is a scientific mission, the data it will collect has never been the highest priority of the UAE. The country, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, built its economy on oil. But oil will not last, and the longer it is, the more devastation the climate crisis in the hot and dry UAE will cause.
The leaders of the country did math, watched the then scant science and technology sectors and looked at the sky. Mars shone: on the Red Planet, UAE leaders saw the opportunity to inspire its citizens and invest in technical skills that would go far beyond oil.
Mars is also very important in an era of climate change, Al Amiri remarked during the virtual event. “Mars is more meaningful to explore and understand, especially the more we want to understand climate change, the more we want to understand how other planets are evolving in our solar system, especially those that look like us,” she said. ‘The only place we can look [as], perhaps, in one form or another, a future of the Earth our neighbor. “
Although the number of coronavirus cases in the United Arab Emirates has only increased since the launch of Hope, the pandemic is no argument for returning from space exploration, Al Amiri said. Mission personnel who designed the spacecraft with international collaborators in part on Zoom long before the pandemic began were ready for some of the challenges of working remotely.
“2020 has given us an increased, even, awareness of what needs to happen,” she said. “As much as the time was challenging … it taught us as a nation how to be more resilient.”
Alas, resilience alone will not see Hope tomorrow through his important maneuver; the mission will also need happiness. Hope’s engineers practiced the maneuver as much as possible on Earth and during the spacecraft’s spacecraft, Al Amiri said, but nothing could match the reality of the insertion of the orbit on Mars.
Related: The most daring Mars missions in history
Half of Mars missions failafter all, many of them are here. “We knew the interests involved; we knew it from day one that we started working on this program,” Al Amiri said during a separate preview event hosted by the University on January 28. of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Spatial Physics. , a leading partner on the mission. “It’s not something we’d scrambled away from.”
To succeed, Hope’s six engines must burn half of the spacecraft’s fuel within 27 minutes to slow down the probe from 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph (121,000 km / h to 18,000 km / h). Mission staff can do nothing but watch during the maneuver.
If something goes wrong, Hope will end up on a new and fruitless path around the sun at its best. And back to earth? “We are moving forward,” Al Amiri said of the United Arab Emirates’ space agency, which is already planning a technological mission to the moon and to a century-long Mars strategy in place.
“It’s not a one-time program; it’s not something you stop after,” she said. “We’ve had a taste of exploring the planet, and I think we’ll continue to do more.”
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.