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The first of a parade of three new visitors to Mars arrives Tuesday when a robotic probe named Hope, the first interplanetary mission undertaken by an Arab nation, is due to enter orbit.
For the United Arab Emirates, just getting there has become a source of pride. Over the weekend, a number of important buildings and monuments in the oil-rich country, which is roughly the size of Maine, were illuminated red in honor of Mars, the red planet.
“From the UAE government’s perspective, 90 percent of this mission has been completed successfully,” said Omran Sharaf, Hope’s project manager.
For the remaining 10%, there’s not much you can do now but watch and wait for the spacecraft to execute the instructions already loaded into its computer.
Sarah al-Amiri, who heads the science part of the mission, said she felt a range of emotions when the spacecraft was launched last summer. But now, as Mars approaches, “It just intensifies them even further,” she said.
Once in orbit, the spacecraft can begin its study of the atmosphere and weather of the Red Planet.
But if a problem with the spacecraft causes it to miss Mars and navigate the solar system, that would likely be the end of the mission. “If you don’t arrive, you don’t arrive,” Ms. al-Amiri said.
Bruce Jakosky, associate director of the Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., Where the Emirati probe was built, said mission officials predicted various scenarios.
“If something goes wrong, the team stands ready and will do their best to recover,” he told Dubai One TV network on Tuesday.
Tuesday at 7:42 p.m. in United Arab Emirates – 10:42 a.m. Eastern Time – controllers at the mission operations center in Dubai received a message from the spacecraft indicating that it had started firing its thrusters to slow down and allow it to fall under the influence of the gravity of Mars.
Since it will take 11 minutes for the radio signal to reach Earth from Mars, the thruster firing will actually have started 11 minutes earlier, and if something goes wrong, it will already be too late.
The UAE space agency will broadcast online coverage of the maneuver starting at 10:30 a.m. EST. Or you can watch it in the video player above.
Twenty-seven minutes later, the thrusters will stop. Five minutes after the firing ends, the spacecraft will pass behind Mars and be out of contact for 15 minutes. When it reappears, controllers can confirm whether it is following a highly elliptical path around Mars.
The mission is to spend two years studying how dust storms and other near-surface weather conditions affect the rate at which Martian air escapes into space.
A day after Hope’s maneuver, a Chinese spacecraft, Tianwen-1, is also due to enter orbit around Mars. The Chinese mission is carrying a lander and rover to explore a large impact basin called Utopia Planitia, but these must not detach from the orbiter and head for the surface until May.
Then Thursday next week, NASA’s latest rover, Perseverance, will also arrive on Mars. Without first entering orbit, it will rapidly decelerate from 12,000 miles per hour to a complete stop on the surface of Mars, what NASA calls “seven minutes of terror.”
Perseverance’s target is Jezero Crater, a dry lake that appears to be a site where signs of life, should life ever manifest on Mars, could be preserved.
The three missions were launched last July to take advantage of a favorable alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs every 26 months.
While NASA has decades of experience in launching spacecraft to other planets, and China has successfully sent a series of robotic missions to the Moon in recent years, the UAE is a newcomer to the world. planetary science.
The Hope Mission is an unusual collaboration between the United Arab Emirates and the Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory, a University of Colorado research institute that has worked on space missions for more than half a century.
Although the spacecraft was built in Colorado, many engineers from the UAE have spent years there and gained expertise by working with their more experienced American counterparts.
Ms al-Amiri said the mission also sparked wider interest in space, with residents of the United Arab Emirates asking questions such as why is there a delay in communications between Earth and Mars. and why is it difficult to enter orbit.
“It has been excellent for deepening science communication with the general public and gaining an understanding in an area that has been largely ignored, not only in the country, but in the region,” Ms. al-Amiri said. “It wasn’t something that was a topic of conversation.”
Since the UAE also lacks rockets and launch pads, the Hope spacecraft traveled to Japan for its space transport, launching in July on an H- rocket. IIA built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Limited.
Over the next seven months, the spacecraft, which weighs around 3,000 pounds and is about the size of an SUV, has traveled 300 million kilometers. The mission controllers were able to forgo the last two scheduled course corrections because the spacecraft stayed right on target.
Along the way, the spacecraft was able to make additional scientific observations. In one, Hope and BepiColombo, a common European-Japanese spacecraft that is on a spiral path to Mercury, turned to each other and made identical measurements of the hydrogen between the two vessels. space. This should help scientists working on both missions calibrate their instruments and gain new information about the solar system.
Another set of observations attempted to track interplanetary dust.
“The opportunity has presented itself, and we know that these datasets are quite rare for scientists who study this type of science, and therefore, we hope to publish it soon and benefit the community,” Ms. al said. -Amiri.
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