UAE: How they got a spacecraft to Mars
The UAE’s space agency sent its first mission to Mars in 2020, less than ten years after it was set up. So how did they pull it off?
On July 19, 2020, a few months after a global pandemic had paralyzed the world, a rocket took off from Tanegashima, a small island in the south of Japan.
On board was a small spaceship just over 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide, weighing about the same as a Ford Focus car. It had many important cameras and spectrometers on board for its upcoming mission, which would take more than 493 million km (306 million miles) from Earth. On top of its gold body was a big black radio antenna that would send its data across the vast, cold void of space to controllers sitting at their monitors.
The name of the spaceship was “Hope.” However, it wasn’t from the United States, Russia, or the European Union. Instead, Hope was the first spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) to go further than an orbit around the Earth. If it works, it will be the first Arab spaceship to reach Mars, and the UAE will be only the fifth country in the world to put a spaceship in orbit around Mars.
As the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was getting ready to celebrate its 50th anniversary, its space agency put its reputation on the line by sending a spaceship into orbit around Mars on the first try to send back information about the weather on Mars that had never been seen before.
UAE didn’t have a space agency six years before the launch
The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) is at the far end of Dubai International Airport, about half an hour’s drive east of the Burj Khalifa. It’s small compared to other space centers. You could lose it in the parking lot of NASA’s massive Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The UAESA, less than ten years old, runs this group of offices, workshops, and clean rooms. From here, much of the work was done to help guide the Emirates Mars Mission to the Red Planet.
It is one of the most ambitious new companies in the space business. However, it opened in 2014. So, a six-year effort to create a pan-Arab space program like the European Space Agency didn’t work out. This made the UAE want to start its space agency and may help explain why it moves so quickly.
Before it had its space agency, the UAE had already launched seven satellites. All of them were made by companies outside of the UAE, like EADS in Europe, Boeing in the U.S., and Satrec Initiative in South Korea. But it was in 2018 that the country could make its own. The Earth-sensing satellite KhalifaSat was built by a team of Emirati engineers at Satrec Initiative’s facilities in South Korea.
KhalifaSat was launched into space in 2018 on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. It took high-resolution pictures of Earth from 613 kilometers (380 miles) up. These pictures could be used for everything from planning cities to helping people after a natural disaster. But the satellite was also meant to start a new space industry in the Emirates from scratch.
Omran Sharaf was in charge of the Emirates Mars Mission in February 2022. Sharaf, who is 38, says that what made him want to do the mission was the “triple helix model, where the private sector, the government, and academics all work together so that this overlap can happen. And not have each area work on its own.”
With this, the UAE put its money on the line to become one of the best space agencies of the 21st century. During the Cold War, these things would have seemed impossible. But exploring space in the 2020s will be a very different thing. The geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which was the main driver of the space race, has broken up. It has many more people involved, including businesses like SpaceX in the U.S. and new agencies from small countries like the UAE.
In the past, when space programs put satellites into orbit, they turned their attention to the Moon, our closest neighbor. Not the UAE, though.
The crash in the aviation industry of the Gulf States during the coronavirus pandemic may have been good for the young space industry. As travel bans took hold, long-haul hubs like Dubai and Abu Dhabi were almost empty. Before the pandemic, the aviation industry was expected to make nearly half of the country’s GDP by 2030. In 2018, it made up almost a quarter of the country’s GDP. So, the government has had to find other ways to keep its economy strong.
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The Emirates Mars Mission wasn’t just a way to show the world the UAE flag. The main goal was to get the complete picture of Mars’s weather cycles that have ever been seen. Three main tools on the spacecraft would be used to study Mars.
The first was a high-resolution imaging unit that measured the amount of water, ice, dust, and other particles in the planet’s atmosphere. Next, an infrared spectrometer would measure the temperature of the planet’s surface and the amount of dust in its atmosphere by measuring how much light it gives off. Finally, the ultraviolet spectrometer on Hope would measure the whole planet’s atmosphere and look at its hydrogen and oxygen levels. Hydrogen and oxygen are the building blocks of water, which is the key to life.
Even though more than 30 spacecraft and landers have been to Mars, most of them only took pictures of its weather. Hope planned to do something much more ambitious. It would go into an orbit to let it take a global picture of Mars’ climate and track it through its distinct seasonal changes.
