(MENAFN- Brazil-Arab News Agency (ANBA)) From the Newsroom
São Paulo – The countdown has begun. In forty days' time, the United Arab Emirates will become the first Arab country to send a mission to Mars. The Hope Mars Mission is slated for launch on July 14 as part of a regionwide drive to build knowledge and create opportunities in science, particularly for young people. Goals include bringing hope to the Arab world, Saudi newspaper Arab News reported.
'This mission is not just about the UAE it's about the region, it's about the Arab issue,' the mission's project manager at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) Omran Sharaf told Arab News.
Sharaf said the region is going through difficult times and is in need of good news. 'We need the youth in the region to really start looking inwards, building their own nations and putting differences aside to co-exist with people with different faiths and backgrounds and work together,' he said.
The Hope Mars Mission is expected to reach the Red Planet in February 2021, the year of the UAE's 50th anniversary. Project design and management is handled by an Emirati team with supervision and funding from the UAE Space Agency. The MBRSC developed the probe in cooperation with international partners including the universities of Colorado, Berkeley and Arizona, in the United States.
UAE minister of State Sarah Al-Amiri explained during a webinar on Monday why the project is so important to the country. 'Today the UAE is an economy based on services, logistics, and oil and gas, and within the region it is considered a diversified economy, but if we project that down the line, the importance of knowledge-intensive sectors becomes more and more prominent for the country, as well as creating new knowledge-intensive organizations,' she said.
Developing talent and creating opportunities for engineers, scientists and researchers in the natural sciences are the next important endeavors for the country, the minister added.
The Hope probe will be launched from Japan on July 14
The Hope probe will study the Martian atmosphere to understand how it developed into its current state, Arab News said. Since no launch pads are available in the UAE, the probe was shipped to Japan in April – three weeks earlier than expected, due to growing restrictions on travel resulting from Covid-19. Budget details are expected at a later date.
'The public understands the importance for the UAE,'said Sharaf. 'It's about addressing our national challenges and building capabilities. We live in a region with geographical challenges, when it comes to water, food and clean energy and everybody is quite excited about this mission because they understand the value it brings,' he said.
Al-Amiri said mission data will be available two months after the probe starts to orbit Mars, by mid-next year. Any scientist will be able to access and analyze the figures,' she said.
'We are looking at and studying a planet that has indications that it was very similar to our own planet and that has undergone some form of change and has gone into a point where it can't have one of the major building blocks of life, as we humans know it and as we have defined it. Understanding the reasons for the loss of hydrogen and oxygen, the building blocks of water from the atmosphere of Mars and understanding what role does Mars itself play,' she said. The team is planning on studying the weather on Mars for an entire year, Arab News reported.
Over the last 60 years, only six countries have sent missions to the Red Planet. The UAE has already launched two satellites and sent an astronaut to the International Space Station and it has vowed to build a human settlement on Mars by 2117.
Three other missions are heading for Mars over the next year, including NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover, China's Tianwen-1, which will launch next month, and ExoMars, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Arab News reported.
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
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