Jubilee Post News & Views
Jubilee News Desk
The United Arab Emirates’ historic first ever mission to weather and climate on Mars is on its way, with a successful lift-off in Japan.
The Hope probe was launched on an H2-A rocket from Tanegashima spaceport for a 500-million-km journey. Two previous attempts to launch the probe in the past week had to be called off because of adverse weather.
Hope’s arrival in February 2021 is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the UAE’s formation.
Her Excellency Sarah Al Amiri, the science lead on Hope, spoke of her excitement and relief in seeing the rocket climb successfully into the sky. And she stated the impact on her country would be the same as that on America when its people watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing 51 years ago.
Today I am really glad that the children in the Emirates will wake up on the morning of the 20th of July having an anchor project of their own, having a new reality, having new possibilities, allowing them to further contribute and to create a larger impact on the world, she said. The UAE craft is one of three missions heading to Mars this month.
The UAE has limited experience of designing and manufacturing spacecraft – and yet here it is attempting something only the US, Russia, Europe and India have succeeded in doing. But it speaks to the Emiratis’ ambition that they should dare to take on this challenge.
“Their propulsion engineers have now done it and they know how to do it the next time they build a spacecraft.”
Three types of sensors are going Mars for measuring the complex make-up of Mars’s atmosphere. These include a high-resolution multiband camera for measuring the planet’s dust and ozone. Second will be an infrared spectrometer for measuring both the upper and lower atmosphere and developed by Arizona State University, one of the project’s three US partner universities. The third sensor will be an ultraviolet spectrometer for measuring oxygen and hydrogen levels.
The planet does have frozen water its polar ice caps, and Nasa has recently found some evidence that liquid water flows at sub-surface levels intermittently on present-day Mars- but the planet is extremely arid when compared to Earth.
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