Six Years After Hope, UAE Engineers Are Leading A 5-Billion-Km Asteroid Mission

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Six years ago, some of the Emirati engineers working on the Hope Probe were still learning how to build and operate the UAE's first interplanetary mission. Today, several of them are leading a spacecraft that will travel almost ten times farther.

Engineers who worked on the Emirates Mars Mission have returned as programme managers, team leaders and specialists on MBR Explorer, the spacecraft being built for a five-billion-kilometre journey through the asteroid belt, Salem Butti Al Qubaisi, Director-General of the UAE Space Agency, told Khaleej Times.

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“There is something called institutional knowledge,” Al Qubaisi said.“The young Emirati engineers who partook in the Emirates Mission to Mars, Hope Probe, are continuing again as leaders, as programme managers, as team leaders in the new MBR Explorer programme.”

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For Al Qubaisi, the progression is one of the clearest signs of what the Hope mission left behind. He compared it to tending a palm tree for a year, watering and caring for it before eventually seeing it bear fruit.

“That's the gratification that I see and I feel,” he said, describing engineers moving from junior roles on one mission into leadership positions on the next.

The change matters because building expertise was part of the purpose of Hope long before the spacecraft reached Mars. An independent University College London assessment of the Emirates Mars Mission before its launch identified a wide range of capabilities already emerging from the programme, including spacecraft project management, risk management, software quality assurance, manufacturing know-how, science capacity and infrastructure.

The researchers also identified greater readiness for future space missions and a mechanism for transferring knowledge from international partners into the UAE. Six years later, MBR Explorer is beginning to show what using that knowledge again looks like.

A much harder mission

The Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt is considerably more complicated than the journey Hope began in July 2020.

MBR Explorer is scheduled to launch in March 2028 and travel about five billion kilometres over a seven-year journey. The UAE Space Agency says the spacecraft will be around twice as long and about 1,000kg heavier than Hope.

It will use gravity-assist manoeuvres around Venus, Earth and Mars to change its speed and trajectory before beginning a series of encounters with asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The first is expected in February 2030. By 2034, the spacecraft is expected to reach its seventh target, Justitia, where it will release a lander to study the asteroid's surface.

The mission will investigate the origins and evolution of water-rich asteroids, their composition and geological history, and whether such bodies could eventually provide resources for future exploration.

MBR Explorer has already passed its critical design review and moved into assembly, integration and testing, when its different systems are physically brought together and tested under conditions intended to resemble those they will face in space.

Al Qubaisi said the team has been able to begin from spacecraft design and operational experience already proven through Hope rather than approaching deep-space exploration from the beginning again.

There is another difference. Some of the people receiving training on Hope are now giving direction.

“Young engineers back in the Hope Probe now are in a position to be leadership in this new programme,” he said.

The Agency has also opened parts of the asteroid mission to engineers from UAE private-sector companies, allowing them to work alongside the mission team and take that experience back into industry.

That feeds into a larger question facing a relatively young space economy: which capabilities should the UAE learn to perform itself?

What does the UAE need to own?

Al Qubaisi was unusually clear that the answer is not everything.

“Trying to say that you can do everything is actually not being honest to yourself,” he said.

The UAE, he said, still does not have domestic launch vehicle providers or the spaceports required to send a mission such as MBR Explorer into deep space.

The spacecraft will again rely on Japan for launch. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which launched Hope in 2020, has been contracted to launch MBR Explorer aboard Japan's H3 rocket.

The asteroid mission also retains a wide international network of scientific and technical partners, including the Italian Space Agency and universities in the United States.

For Al Qubaisi, national capability therefore means making choices rather than eliminating international dependence.

“It's not about having everything,” he said.“It's how you are able to do specific things, important things, sovereign things that are really meaningful, that have great strategic value but also great commercial value.”

One example is travelling aboard MBR Explorer itself.

The Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi is leading the design, development and testing of the lander that will eventually separate from the spacecraft and attempt to reach Justitia.

The project also creates opportunities for UAE startups to participate, while half of the wider asteroid mission's work has been allocated to UAE-based companies.

It is a much more tangible form of capability-building than simply placing a national flag on a spacecraft: engineers and institutions inside the country have to learn how to design hardware that must operate millions of kilometres from immediate human help. the same philosophy is visible much closer to Earth.

Choosing technologies to bring home

The UAE's Sirb programme is developing a constellation of synthetic aperture radar satellites, which use radar rather than conventional optical cameras to build images of the Earth's surface.

Its published objectives go beyond acquiring the satellites. The Space Agency says the programme is intended to transfer SAR payload and mission-development know-how into the UAE, obtain intellectual property that could later be commercialised, establish facilities capable of supporting payload development inside the country and build a local supply chain.

Al Qubaisi said the approach begins with understanding where gaps remain in the UAE space supply chain and deciding which of them are sufficiently important to justify funding and technology transfer.

That calculation is becoming more significant as the government asks the sector to produce economic returns alongside scientific missions.

Under the National Space Strategy 2031, the UAE is aiming to double space economy revenues and the number of national space companies, increase the sector's economic value added by 60 per cent and rank among the world's top 10 space economies.

Al Qubaisi described it as a change in how progress itself is measured.

The next phase, he said, is moving“from measuring success through how many missions we have to measuring the wider contribution of space to the national economy”.

That means missions such as Hope and MBR Explorer carry two sets of expectations.

One is scientific. Hope has produced data on the Martian atmosphere for researchers around the world, while MBR Explorer is designed to add to what scientists know about some of the Solar System's oldest bodies.

The other is what remains in the UAE after the spacecraft has gone.

Engineers, software, intellectual property, companies, facilities and the ability to take responsibility for progressively harder parts of a mission are now part of that calculation.

International partnership remains central to that model. Al Qubaisi's argument is that cooperation should not be confused with standing still. The UAE can continue using a Japanese rocket while taking responsibility for other layers of the mission that once required greater outside support.

MBR Explorer still has nearly two years of assembly and testing ahead before its planned launch window. Then comes a journey lasting years before it reaches its final asteroid. The spacecraft will provide one measure of whether the mission succeeds and according the the well experienced space chief, the people building it provide another.

Six years after Hope left Earth, some of the Emirati engineers who were learning to execute the country's first interplanetary mission are now responsible for executing its hardest one yet.

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