UAE goes to Mars (07/19/2020), travel 300 million miles journey and schedule to arrive in Feb2021
CAIRO, July 20 (Xinhua) -- The United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Monday celebrated the launch of its Hope probe, Arab world's first Mars orbiter, deemed as an ambitious and pioneering breakthrough.
Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. on Monday launched a rocket carrying the orbiter from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture in southwestern Japan.
The 1.5-ton Hope Probe, which measures 2.9 meters in length and 2.37 meters in width, was developed at Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai.
It is expected to reach orbit around Mars in 2021 to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the UAE.
The mission is also the first of its kind by a Middle Eastern country.
Its success immediately triggered vast jubilation across the UAE. The orbiter was launched at 1:58 a.m. local time in UAE, but many Emirati citizens were still watching the live broadcast of the launch through TV and internet, witnessing their dream come true.
UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan said the launch of the Hope probe on its "historic" journey to Mars under the slogan of "Nothing is impossible" constitutes a national and Arab achievement and an advanced Emirati push in the process of building global knowledge in space.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE prime minister and ruler of Dubai, said the UAE has created history with an unprecedented Arab space achievement.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, said the UAE has strengthened its position as a country that "creates future and embraces hope."
In an online press conference, project manager Omran Sharaf said the probe's broader objective was aimed at developing the country's space sector so that more investment could be garnered for a knowledge-based economy that was less dependent on oil.
Sara Musallam, chairman of Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge, commended UAE leadership on this Mars mission and said education is in place to nurture the next generation of homegrown space adventurers.
"In celebrating the success, we remain committed to ensuring the country's future generations are equipped with the core skills and learning competencies required to keep driving our nation's ambitions higher," Musallam said.
Hussein al-Shafei, adviser to the Russian Space Agency and head of the Egyptian-Russian Foundation for Culture and Science, highly praised the launch as a very ambitious program and a real step forward for space exploration.
"The UAE is a pioneering country in the field of space," said Al-Shafei. "Our Arab world really suffers a shortage in the number of space specialists, but the UAE space program will be a window and new hope for young generation with desires to learn about space."
He stressed the program will be a great incentive for young Arab scientists who want to take space exploration as a real career to develop Arab world.
"This Mars mission of the UAE is a remarkable change in the space exploration industry that has been dominated by big world powers," he added.
The expert believes the "moral value" of the mission is higher than the financial benefits.
Joshua Teitelbaum, professor in Department of Middle Eastern Studies of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, also spoke highly of the Mars mission by the UAE.
Teitelbaum said as a small but wealthy country, the UAE's great fortune provides conditions for such a program, which can help the country project "an image of modernity, technological progress, and openness to world, showing a different Gulf state not so conservative."
He praised that the development of the UAE, especially Dubai, in the past decades reflects its desire to exert influence on the world stage, saying the UAE has been "supporting charities, establishing financial hubs and free zones, and promoting tourism."
The professor said all these moves, along with the Mars mission, have impressed the world: the UAE is the first Arab country to realize such achievement.
In fact, the UAE has influences in many arenas, like in Yemen, Libya and Syria, as well as in Israel and the United States.
Despite there is no official diplomatic ties between the UAE and Israel, the two countries have good bilateral relations, rarely seen between Israel and Arab states.
Moreover, Teitelbaum said in the past decade, turmoil has swept former powers in the Arab world. This leaves the field for wealthy gulf countries like UAE with increasing soft power.
"I wouldn't be surprised if the UAE ... makes more steps in near future, further projecting its influence and soft power," he added
July 15, 2020 @ The Tanegashima Space Center (TNSC), Japan's latest space center by the ocean (reference : internet)
Mitsubishi H-2A rocket lifted 'hope' probe into space
Hope probe: UAE launches historic first mission to Mars
The United Arab Emirates' historic first mission to Mars is under way, after a successful lift-off in Japan.
The Hope probe launched on an H2-A rocket from Tanegashima spaceport, and is now on a 500-million-km journey to study the planet's weather and climate.
Two previous attempts to launch the probe in the past week had to be called off because of adverse weather.
Hope's arrival in February 2021 is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the UAE's formation.
Her Excellency Sarah Al Amiri, the science lead on Hope, spoke of her excitement and relief in seeing the rocket climb successfully into the sky. And she stated the impact on her country would be the same as that on America when its people watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing 51 years ago, also on 20 July.
"It was an anchor for an entire generation that stimulated everyone that watched it to push further and to dream bigger," she told BBC News.
"Today I am really glad that the children in the Emirates will wake up on the morning of the 20th of July having an anchor project of their own, having a new reality, having new possibilities, allowing them to further contribute and to create a larger impact on the world."
The UAE craft is one of three missions heading to Mars this month.
The US and China both have surface rovers in the late stages of preparation. The American mission, Perseverance, sent its congratulations to Hope. "I cannot wait to join you on the journey!" its Twitter account said.
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Why is the UAE going to Mars?
The UAE has limited experience of designing and manufacturing spacecraft - and yet here it is attempting something only the US, Russia, Europe and India have succeeded in doing. But it speaks to the Emiratis' ambition that they should dare to take on this challenge.
Their engineers, mentored by American experts, have produced a sophisticated probe in just six years - and when this satellite gets to Mars, it's expected to deliver novel science, revealing fresh insights on the workings of the planet's atmosphere.
In particular, scientists think it can add to our understanding of how Mars lost much of its air and with it a great deal of its water.
The Hope probe is regarded very much as a vehicle for inspiration - something that will attract more young people in the Emirates and across the Arab region to take up the sciences in school and in higher education.
The satellite is one of a number of projects the UAE government says signals its intention to move the country away from a dependence on oil and gas and towards a future based on a knowledge economy.
But as ever when it comes to Mars, the risks are high. A half of all missions sent to the Red Planet have ended in failure. Hope project director, Omran Sharaf, recognises the dangers but insists his country is right to try.
"This is a research and development mission and, yes, failure is an option," he told BBC News.
"However, failure to progress as a nation is not an option. And what matters the most here is the capacity and the capability that the UAE gained out of this mission, and the knowledge it brought into the country."
How has the UAE managed to do this?
The UAE government told the project team it couldn't purchase the spacecraft from a big, foreign corporation; it had to build the satellite itself.
This meant going into partnership with American universities that had the necessary experience. Emirati and US engineers and scientists worked alongside each other to design and build the spacecraft systems and the three onboard instruments that will study the planet.
While much of the satellite's fabrication occurred at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, considerable work was also undertaken at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai.
LASP's Brett Landin believes the Emiratis are now in a great place to do another mission on their own.
"I could give you the process for fuelling a spacecraft, but until you've put on an escape suit and transferred 800kg of highly volatile rocket fuel from storage tanks into the spacecraft, you don't really know what it's like," the senior systems engineer said.
"Their propulsion engineers have now done it and they know how to do it the next time they build a spacecraft."
What science will Hope do at Mars?
The Emiratis didn't want to do "me too" science; they didn't want to turn up at the Red Planet and repeat measurements that had already been made by others. So they went to a US space agency (Nasa) advisory committee called the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) and asked what research a UAE probe could usefully add to the current state of knowledge.
MEPAG's recommendations framed Hope's objectives. In one line, the UAE satellite is going to study how energy moves through the atmosphere - from bottom to top, at all times of day, and through all the seasons of the year.
It will track features such as lofted dust which on Mars hugely influences the temperature of the atmosphere.
It will also look at what's happening with the behaviour of neutral atoms of hydrogen and oxygen right at the top of the atmosphere. There's a suspicion these atoms play a significant role in the ongoing erosion of Mars' atmosphere by the energetic particles that stream away from the Sun.
This plays into the story of why the planet is now missing most of the water it clearly had early in its history.
To gather its observations, Hope will take up a near-equatorial orbit that stands off from the planet at a distance of 22,000km to 44,000km.
"The desire to see every piece of real estate at every time of day ended up making the orbit very large and elliptical," explained core science team lead on Hope, David Brain from LASP.
"By making those choices, we will for example be able to hover over Olympus Mons (the largest volcano in the Solar System) as Olympus Mons moves through different times of day. And at other times, we'll be letting Mars spin underneath us.
"We'll get full disc images of Mars, but our camera has filters, so we'll be doing science with those images - getting global views with different goggles on, if you like."
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