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Tomorrow, the history and hopes of the Arab world will depend on the endurance and independence of six engines tasked with putting an SUV-sized spacecraft into orbit. March.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched this spacecraft, dubbed Hope, in July 2020, lofted its first interplanetary mission just over a decade after becoming a space nation. Now, after a smooth seven-month cruise, the UAE is preparing for Hope’s arrival to the Red Planet on February 9. It’s a complex maneuver that forces the spacecraft to perform intense engine combustion without the support of the mission engineers, who anxiously await bulletins that the geometry of the solar system delays by 10 minutes.
“That means 27 minutes of fuel burning, using our thrusters, the spacecraft going through one of the most difficult challenges for which it was designed,” said Sarah Al Amiri, President of the Space Agency. from the UAE, at a virtual event hosted on February 1 by the US-UAE Business Council, a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC
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Formally called Mars Orbit Insertion, the milestone of tomorrow will allow the Hope team to focus on science while making the UAE the fifth entity to orbit the red planet. (NASA, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency and India preceded it; China will attempt to join the exclusive club a day later with its Mission Tianwen-1.)
“The UAE has led the Arab world to new frontiers in deep space for the first time in history,” said Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and leader of the UAE in a statement. emirate of Dubai. “Our space mission carries a message of hope and confidence in Arab youth.”
Hope is a mission for these young people, who dominate demographically in the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East, Al Amiri stressed throughout the spacecraft’s journey. “Young people were used and radicalized in the region,” she said. “People just wanted opportunities and wanted to be able to apply positively for growth.”
Related: UAE wants to rewrite what we know about the weather on Mars
Space exploration has launched an attractive rallying cry. “That’s what space is; it takes the context of nationality out of it,” Al Amiri said. “You are becoming a species more than anything else.”
And while Hope is a science mission, the data it collects has never been the UAE’s top priority. The country, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, builds its economy on oil. But the oil won’t last, and the longer it lasts, the more devastating the climate crisis will wreak in the hot and arid United Arab Emirates.
The country’s leaders did the math, looked at its then lean science and technology sectors, and looked skyward. Mars sparkled: On the Red Planet, UAE leaders saw an opportunity to inspire its citizens and invest in technical skills that go far beyond oil.
Mars also has special significance at a time of climate change, Al Amiri noted during the virtual event. “Mars makes more sense to explore and understand, especially as we want to understand climate change, the more we want to understand how other planets in our solar system evolve, especially those that look like us,” he said. she declared. “The only place we can look [as], perhaps, in one form or another, a future of Earth, is our next door neighbor. “
Although the number of coronavirus cases in the United Arab Emirates has only increased since Hope’s launch, the pandemic is not an argument to move away from space exploration, Al Amiri said. Mission staff who designed the spacecraft with international collaborators in part on Zoom long before the onset of the pandemic were ready to take on some of the challenges of working remotely.
“2020 has given us a heightened sense, even, of awareness of what needs to happen,” she said. “While the weather has been tough… it has taught us as a nation how to be more resilient.
Alas, resilience alone won’t see Hope through his crucial maneuver tomorrow; the mission will also need a little luck. Hope’s engineers practiced the maneuver as much as they could, on Earth and during the spacecraft’s cruise, Al Amiri said, but nothing can match the reality of the Mars orbit insertion.
Related: The most daring Martian missions in history
Half of missions to Mars fail, after all, a lot of them here. “We knew the stakes of this project; we knew that from the first day we started working on this program, ”Al Amiri said at a separate preview event Jan. 28 hosted by the Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory at the University of Colorado in Boulder. . , a leading partner on the mission. “It is not something that we have avoided.”
To be successful, Hope’s six engines must burn half the spacecraft’s fuel in 27 minutes to slow the probe from 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph (121,000 km / h to 18,000 km / h). Mission personnel cannot do anything during the maneuver but watch.
If something goes wrong, at best, Hope will stumble on a new barren path around the sun. And back to Earth? “We are continuing,” Al Amiri said of the UAE space agency, which is already planning a technology mission to the moon and put a a century-old strategy on Mars in place.
“It’s not a one-time program; it’s not something you stopped after, ”she said. “We got a taste of planetary exploration, and I think we’ll continue to explore more.”
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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