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A robotic probe belonging to the United Arab Emirates is preparing to jump into orbit of Mars on Tuesday after launching from Earth last year. For mission leaders in Dubai, this is an agonizing highlight in the UAE’s first deep space mission. If successful, the Hope probe will examine the Martian atmosphere. The UAE cabinet hopes the mission will also inspire a new sector of science and technology as the Gulf state seeks to wean its economy off dependence on oil.
The Hope spacecraft was launched from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center last July as Earth and Mars aligned in their orbits around the Sun. Now, having traveled over 300 million miles, Hope is set to perform a complex, fully autonomous maneuver called the Mars Orbit Insertion at 10:30 a.m.ET. Mission control in Dubai will not know if the MOI started before 10:42 a.m.ET due to a 22 minute delay in round-trip communications via NASA’s deep space network. Manual real-time control is impossible, so Hope will have to perform these orbital dances on his own.
MOI asks Hope to slow down her cruising speed from 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph in order to get carried away by the gravity of Mars. He’ll hit the brakes by pulling his six Delta-V thrusters for 27 minutes. This should put the spacecraft in “capture orbit” around the red planet. Five minutes later, mission directors will lose contact with Hope as he flies across Mars, cutting off radio signals for about 15 minutes.
“This has been repeated enough times, we have thought of every scenario that can go right or wrong, and that has been programmed into the command sequence,” said Sarah al-Amiri, deputy project manager of the Emirates Mars mission. . The edge.
Hope’s mission team of approximately 450 people have designed and tested the Hope spacecraft over the past six years in preparation for this mission. If all goes well, the Hope mission will make the UAE the fifth space power to reach Mars after the United States, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency and India.
Over the next two months, Hope will perform a few more maneuvers to jump into a closer orbit around Mars. This will be essential to achieve its primary goal of scanning the Martian atmosphere and capturing a global snapshot of the planet’s weather conditions. Hope will revolve around Mars every 55 hours and capture a full snapshot every nine days.
The Emirates Mars mission Twitter account will be Tweeter updates throughout the mission. The UAE space agency will also host a live broadcast of the mission control in Dubai starting at 9 a.m.ET before the maneuver begins at 10:30 a.m.ET. Log in to see if the UAE completes their first interplanetary mission.
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