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The Emirates Mars mission, known as the Hope Probe, will orbit Mars on February 9.
The mission was one of three missions launched to Mars from Earth in July, including NASA’s Perseverance rover and China’s Tianwen-1 mission. Hope will revolve around the planet, Tianwen-1 will orbit and land on the planet, and Perseverance will land on Mars.
All three missions were launched at around the same time due to an alignment between Mars and Earth on the same side of the sun, allowing for more efficient travel to Mars.
When the the spacecraft arrives, the Hope probe will mark the United Arab Emirates as the fifth country in history to reach the red planet. The ambitions of the mission do not end there.
The probe, with its three scientific instruments, is expected to create the first complete portrait of the Martian atmosphere. The instruments will collect different data points on the atmosphere to also measure seasonal and daily changes.
This information will give scientists an idea of the dynamics of climate and weather in the different layers of the Martian atmosphere. Together, this will help to understand how energy and particles, like oxygen and hydrogen, are moved through the atmosphere and how they even escape from Mars.
“We need to do more to quantify this loss and understand how the rest of the atmosphere influences this loss from a global perspective.”
The mission team said the spacecraft is in very good health and behaving exactly as it is supposed to in the days leading up to its arrival at a press conference on Thursday.
The rise of the mission’s arrival to Mars was an emotional roller coaster, said Her Excellency Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri, President of the United Arab Emirates Space Agency and UAE Minister of State for Advanced Science United Arabs.
“Each point of celebration is followed by several points of concern while waiting for the next points of celebration,” she said.
“On the other hand, one of our mission goals was to stimulate a lot of students and a whole society into STEM. And we have seen a big change in the mindset of students, first and foremost, in the Emirates. But we’ve also seen a lot of engagement in the region, a region which is generally known to be unstable, and which has triggered a lot of thinking about what is possible. “
Arrival on Mars
The Hope spacecraft is moving at such a speed towards Mars that if it doesn’t slow down properly on arrival, the spacecraft will literally use Mars’ gravity to launch it into deep space.
Almost half of the spacecraft’s fuel will be used to slow it down enough for the spacecraft to be captured by gravity from Mars and enter orbit.
By firing its thrusters for 30 minutes before reaching Mars, it will slow down from a speed of over 75,185 miles per hour to 11,184 miles per hour.
For reference, when the Perseverance rover arrives to land on Mars on February 18, it will peak at the Martian atmosphere at over 12,000 miles per hour and only have seven minutes to decelerate for a soft surface landing.
The Hope Probe team considers this phase of the spacecraft’s arrival on Mars, known as the Mars Orbit Insertion Phase, to be just as critical and risky as the launch of the spacecraft. And just as Perseverance will essentially land on Mars without any interference from NASA, Hope will be able to respond to any issues and take care of himself, to some extent.
Once Hope establishes an orbit around Mars, it will make contact with Earth via a ground station in Spain. The one-way light time between Mars and Earth takes 10-11 minutes, so the signal will be slightly delayed.
“Less than half of the spacecraft that have been sent to Mars have actually done so,” said Pete Withnell, program director for the mission at the Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory. “But it’s a very practiced, highly simulated and highly analyzed event. I can’t imagine being any better prepared than we are now.”
Capture a new view
Once gravity from Mars captures Hope, it will enter an elliptical orbit around the planet, approaching 621 miles above the Martian surface and 30,683 miles from it. It will take Hope about 40 hours to complete an orbit.
The probe will return its first image of Mars during this time.
Hope will remain in this phase, called capture orbit, between February and mid-May during the mission’s transition phase, according to Brain.
During this transition, ground crews will send commands to the spacecraft to test the instruments and make observations of Mars to see if any of the instruments need tweaking.
Then it’s time to maneuver Hope into scientific orbit which will allow the probe’s instruments to begin capturing scientific data from Mars.
Hope will complete a scientific orbit of the planet every 55 hours. This orbit will provide the first global image of meteorological and atmospheric dynamics on Mars, which will be shared with the scientific community via the mission’s data center.
The mission is expected to last two years, with the possibility of being extended for a third year.
The probe will be in a different orbit than the old spacecraft that visited Mars.
“It’s a very high altitude orbit, much higher than any other science mission to Mars,” Brain said. “In this high altitude orbit, where our instruments observe Mars from a global perspective, will always see about half of Mars, no matter where we are in orbit when we look at the planet.”
Orbit will bring the probe close enough to parallel with the Martian equator, allowing the spacecraft to capture different times of the day on the planet. And the fact that it’s an elliptical or an oval orbit means that the observations will be captured near and far from Mars.
“It can observe many geographic regions at a single time of day as the entire probe approaches Mars and accelerates, and it can match the speed at which Mars spins on its axis,” Brain said. “It can hover over a single geographic region like the great Olympus Mons volcano and study the atmosphere there at various times of the day.”
All nine days of the mission, the probe will have completely captured an image of the Martian atmosphere.
“We will have observed every geographic region every hour of the day, every nine days,” Brain said.
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