Like any economic power, the United Arab Emirates can’t stay far from space exploration. Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) has panned for this year in July an important launch: Hope Mars Mission.
UAE Is Hopeful that Its Mars Missions Will Be Successful
Built with the help of the University of Colorado, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Berkeley, Hope Mars Mission is scheduled to reach Mars in 2021 so that it would be celebrated together with the 50th anniversary of the United Arab Emirates’ formation.
Hope’s mission is to demystify Martian atmospheric loss of hydrogen and oxygen into space and its drastic climate changes. It is expected to act as a weather satellite, the first of its kind. The higher ground of this mission is meta-data-sharing or knowledge sharing. All data gained by Hope will be available to 200 universities, and research institutes all over the world.
On Tuesday, May 5, Hope Probe Mars arrived in Japan at the Tenegashima Space Centre, and it will be prepared for the launch. Sheikh Hamdan held a video conference with the team there saying to them: “You lead the future and you represent the UAE’s hope in the emerging phase. You must transfer your knowledge to other sectors in the country because sharing knowledge and success stories are the heart of this project.”
More About Hope Mars Mission
The spacecraft was transferred to Japan, where it will be launched from, using a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA launcher. It was a complicated process to get the probe to Japan. A three-phase process.
First, it had to be transported between the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre to Dubai’s Al Maktoum Airport. A special container had to be used for a 12-hour trip.
Then, the 11-hours flight to Nagoya Airport in Japan needed special surveillance of the air bumps. The vibrations they cause can do lots of damage to the probe’s structure that could later affect the mission—the third phase involver sea travel. The probe had to arrive on Tenagashima Island, where it will be launched on July 14.
