A robotic probe owned by the United Arab Emirates is preparing to jump into orbit around Mars on Tuesday after being launched from Earth last year. For task managers in Dubai, it’s a nerve-wracking climax on the UAE’s first mission into deep space. If successful, then Amal The probe will scan the Martian atmosphere. The Emirati Cabinet hopes the mission will also inspire a new science and technology sector as the Gulf state looks to wean its economy from dependence on oil.
The Hope Probe was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan last July as Earth and Mars aligned in their orbit around the sun. Now, having traveled more than 300 million miles, Hope is set to implement a complex and fully autonomous maneuver called the Mars Orbit Insertion at 10:30 AM ET. The Mission Control Center in Dubai will not know if the Interior Ministry started until 10:42 a.m. ET due to a 22-minute round-trip communications delay across NASA’s Deep Space Network. Real-time manual control is impossible, so Hope will need to perform these tropical dances on his own.
The Home Office is asking Hope to slow her cruising speed of 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph in order to drift off the gravitational pull of Mars. You’ll hit the brakes with firing all six Delta-V thrusts for 27 minutes. This should put the spacecraft in «capture orbit» around the red planet. After five minutes, the mission managers will lose contact with Hope as it flies around the far side of Mars, and cuts off radio signals for about 15 minutes.
«It has been trained enough times, and we thought about every scenario that might go right or wrong, and it was programmed into the command sequence,» said Sarah Al Ameri, deputy project director for the Emirates Mission to explore Mars. the edge.
The 450-man Hope Mission Team has designed and tested the Hope spacecraft over the past six years in preparation for the mission. If all goes well, Mission Hope will make the UAE the fifth space-faring 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 would be key to fulfilling its main goal: to survey Mars’ atmosphere and capture a global snapshot of the weather patterns on the planet. Hope will orbit Mars every 55 hours and capture a full shot every nine days.
The Emirates Mars Mission account will be on Twitter Twitter Updates throughout the mission. The UAE Space Agency will also host a Live broadcast Mission control in Dubai starting at 9 AM ET before the maneuver begins at 10:30 AM ET. We follow next, to see if the UAE will succeed in its first interplanetary mission.
