Hope Probe: UAE all set to send its first mission to Mars tonight

The UAE is all set to send its first mission to space. Mars Hope Probe will lift off atop a Japanese rocket at 00:51:27 UAE time Japan’s Tanegashima Space Centre (TNSC) aboard Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ H-IIA rocket early July 15 morning.

According to international news sources, it will be the first probe to get the complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers when it reaches the red planet’s orbit in 2021 after completing a 495,000,000km journey.

The countdown will be done in the Arabic language for the first time. 

A minister said that The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) will encourage big companies and small and medium enterprises to make progress. “When you talk about transforming the economy and developing science and technology, and building new companies and small and medium enterprises, it depends on the capability to take risks, mitigate them and come out with larger impacts,” said Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, Minister of State for Advanced Technology, and Deputy Project Manager and Science Lead of the EMM.

What is the Hope probe?

It is the first Arab interplanetary mission designed to orbit Mars and provide the first-ever complete image of the Martian atmosphere.  

According to details, the hope probe will examine the dynamics of the Martian atmosphere. It will provide a complete view of the Mars atmosphere and will examine the queries such as oxygen gases into space. 

Hope Probe is likely to collect more than 1,000 GB of new data which will be shared with more than 200 academic and scientific institutions around the world for free.

Scientists will be able to get a deep knowledge about the past and future of the earth as well as human settlement on Mars and other planetary objects by studying Martian weather thoroughly. 

Mars rotates on its axis, completing one rotation, every 24.6 hours. Martian days are called Sols (short for the solar day). Hope Probe will orbit Mars for one whole Martian year that lasts 669.6 sols or equivalent to 687 Earth days or about two Earth years. 

Emirati engineers who coordinated with American engineers and scientists at three US universities, including the University of Colorado, University of California Berkeley, and Arizona State University, created the Probe. According to Gulf News, here is the timeline of the development of Hope Probe.

Hope Probe timeline

• 2014- Announcement of the mission
• 2015 – Preliminary design
• 2016 – Review of preliminary
• 2017 – Critical design review
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• 2018 – Development and assembly
•  2019 – Testing
• 2020 – Launch and cruise
•  2021 – Mars orbit and science operations (until 2023)
• 2024 – Extended science operations