Being the first of the three big space launches happening this month, the United Arab Emirates’ car-sized Hope probe successfully took off from southern Japan. The launch also marks it as the UAE’s first interplanetary mission to Mars.
The Hope probe is expected to make some significant new discoveries while at Mars. It will take an elliptical path around Mars, and will then come close to the surface every 55 hours. This will allow the craft to observe roughly the same parts of the planet at different times of the Martian day.
The spacecraft took off today on top of a Japanese H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center at 6:58AM at the launch site (or 5:58AM Malaysian time). Hope will now have to spend 7 months travelling through space until February 2021 to put itself into an elongated orbit around Mars.
Source: Emirates Mars Mission
The launch this year was especially important because it was to ensure that Hope is in orbit by the 50th anniversary of the UAE’s founding in 2021. 2020 has a small window when Earth and Mars come closest together during their orbits around the Sun—and this planetary alignment happens once every 26 months.
It seems more like an amazing feat once you’ve learnt that the engineers and scientists had just six years to get the probe ready for launch. Their government also tasked them with building the spacecraft themselves within a set budget of USD200 million (RM853 million).
“The government was very clear to us about it: they wanted us to come up with a new model of executing such missions and delivering such missions. So they didn’t want something with a big, big budget. They wanted something to be delivered quick, fast, and something that we can share with the rest of the world, about how they can approach missions,” said Omran Sharaf, the project manager for the Emirates Mars Mission.
In February, the Hope probe will have to do a lot on its own as it tries to insert itself into Mars’ orbit—including slowing itself down from more than 121,000 km an hour to more than 18,000 km an hour without input from Earth. It will take too long to get a signal to Mars in time to make any corrections.
Besides the Hope probe, the U.S. and China are also launching their own Mars missions this month. NASA’s Perseverance rover will be launching on the 30th July, and China hasn’t specified a launch date yet, though it’s planning for late July as well. You can read more about them here.
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