Emirates Mars Mission

• 1. Introduction

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  The Emirates Mars Mission sent a spacecraft called Hope into orbit around Mars. That arrival made the United Arab Emirates the fifth country ever to reach the Red Planet, and the first Arab nation to do so. A cabinet meeting, a Japanese rocket, and a pandemic quarantine all shaped how it got there. Emirati engineers built Hope alongside American scientists, in a laboratory thousands of kilometers from Dubai. The finished spacecraft was then shipped to a small Japanese island for its launch. What convinced a Gulf nation to attempt a mission to Mars? How did the spacecraft reach its rocket in the middle of a global pandemic? And what did its scientific instruments find once they reached the thin Martian sky?

• 2. A Cabinet's Ambition

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  At a cabinet retreat at the end of 2013, UAE officials first discussed sending a spacecraft to Mars. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates, announced the mission in July 2014. The goal was to build up the skills of Emirati engineers and deepen understanding of the Martian atmosphere.

  In April 2015, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid invited the entire Arab world to suggest a name for the probe. Thousands of submissions arrived, and organizers announced the winning name, Hope, in May 2015. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum explained that the name was chosen "because it sends a message of optimism to millions of young Arabs."

  When he unveiled the mission, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum framed it around three messages. One: Arab civilization once helped shape human knowledge, and would do so again. Another: Arab nations could compete with the world's leading powers in the race for knowledge. A third: ambition should have no limits, not even the boundary of space.

  Officials timed the mission to arrive before the 50th anniversary of the United Arab Emirates' independence, on the 2nd of December 2021. According to Mohammad bin Abdullah Al Gergawi, the UAE's minister of cabinet affairs, the mission cost US$200 million.

  A full-scale prototype of the Hope spacecraft went on display at the Dubai Airshow in November 2017. Project manager Omran Sharaf said at the time that the mission remained on track for a July 2020 launch. None of that ambition could be realized without engineers far from Dubai, learning in a laboratory they'd never used before.

• 3. Built By Two Nations

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  At the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, known as LASP, Emirati engineers built Hope alongside their American counterparts. Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley, also supported the effort.

  Omran Sharaf served as project director, while Pete Withnell held the role of program manager. Sarah Amiri worked as deputy program manager and lead science investigator, collaborating with LASP, UC Berkeley, and ASU to help design and build the orbiter and guide the mission's scientific objectives. Ibrahim Hamza Al Qasim served as deputy project manager for strategic planning, and Zakareyya Al Shamsi held the same title for operations.

  The team includes about 150 Emirati engineers, alongside roughly 200 engineers and scientists at partner institutes in the United States. The work was organized into seven groups: spacecraft, logistics, mission operations, project management, science education and outreach, ground station, and launch vehicle.

  The UAE Space Agency also set up a joint working group with the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, to assist the mission. ISRO representatives met with the team and shared lessons from their own Mars mission experience. That international teamwork would soon be tested by a pandemic breaking out just as Hope neared its launch date.

• 4. A Pandemic Journey

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  The Hope probe reached its launch site in Japan in April 2020, but only after officials navigated coronavirus quarantine protocols and travel restrictions. The outbreak forced mission managers to shuffle their schedule and send the probe to Japan earlier than planned. That decision forced engineers in Dubai to curtail some planned testing, though all critical checks were finished before the orbiter left in April 2020.

  Eleven engineers and technicians were dispatched to Japan in early April and spent two weeks in quarantine to confirm they had no symptoms of COVID-19. On the 20th of April 2020, the spacecraft left the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai to begin a four-day journey to Tanegashima. Packed inside a climate-controlled shipping container, it traveled aboard a Russian-operated, Ukrainian-built Antonov An-124 cargo plane from Dubai to Nagoya. The final leg happened aboard a ship, which carried the probe from Nagoya to Tanegashima Island on the 24th of April 2020. Six members of the mission team accompanied the spacecraft and served their own two-week quarantine under Japanese government rules. Once cleared, they joined the eleven engineers and technicians for final testing inside a clean room at Tanegashima's payload processing facility.

  The launch window opened on the 14th of July 2020. The rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center near Minamitane, Japan, on the 19th of July 2020, at 21:58:14 UTC. A Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA launch vehicle carried Hope into space. On the 17th of August 2020, mission officials announced that Hope had successfully completed its first interplanetary course correction maneuver, known as TCM1.

  About 200 days and roughly 493 million kilometers of open space still separated Hope from the planet it was built to study.

• 5. Anatomy Of Hope

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  A mass of 1350 kilograms, including propellant, makes Hope comparable in size to a small car. The probe's cuboid frame is built from aluminium in a honeycomb structure, finished with a composite face-sheet. It measures 2.37 meters wide and 2.90 meters long.

  Two solar panels generate 1800 watts to charge Hope's batteries. A high-gain antenna, 1.85 meters across, sends a narrow radio beam back to Earth, while smaller low-gain antennas handle lower-bandwidth communication. Star trackers determine the probe's position by identifying constellations relative to the Sun.

  Six 120-newton thrusters manage the spacecraft's velocity, while eight smaller 5-newton thrusters handle attitude control and delicate maneuvers. Reaction wheels let Hope reorient itself in space, turning its antenna toward Earth or pointing an instrument toward Mars.

  Three instruments do the scientific work aboard Hope. The Emirates eXploration Imager, or EXI, is a multi-band camera built at LASP with MBRSC, capable of resolving details smaller than 8 kilometers across. Its six-filter wheel, split between three ultraviolet and three visible bands, measures water, ice, dust, aerosols, and ozone in the Martian atmosphere. The Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer, or EMIRS, was developed by Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and MBRSC. It reads emitted radiance to determine surface and atmospheric temperatures, along with ice, water vapor, and dust in the lower and middle atmosphere. The Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer, or EMUS, led by LASP, measures far-ultraviolet emissions between 100 and 170 nanometers. That data reveals the thermosphere's characteristics and traces hydrogen and oxygen escaping into space.

  KinetX Aerospace, based in Tempe, Arizona, handled the mission's navigation, using tracking data from NASA's Deep Space Network to estimate Hope's trajectory. Advanced Space, based in Boulder, Colorado, designed the reference trajectory and maneuvers, and verified every burn against the mission's launch targets. Every one of those thrusters would get one real test: firing together above an alien planet, with no chance for a rehearsal.

• 6. Racing Into Orbit

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  Hope launched as the first of three missions to leave for Mars during the July 2020 launch window. China sent the Tianwen-1 orbiter, along with a lander and the Zhurong rover. The United States launched Mars 2020, carrying the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter drone. All three spacecraft reached Mars in February 2021, but Hope arrived first.

  At around 19:42 Gulf Standard Time on the 9th of February 2021, Hope began firing its thrusters to enter Mars orbit. The burn lasted about 27 minutes, after which the craft swung behind Mars and fell silent. Roughly 15 minutes later, it reported back that the maneuver had succeeded. The achievement also made the UAE the second country ever to enter Mars orbit on its first attempt, after India.

  To choose its science goals, the mission team consulted the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, a NASA-led international forum that tracks gaps in Mars knowledge. They chose a high supersynchronous orbit, with a periapse near 20,000 kilometers, an apoapse near 43,000 kilometers, and a 55-hour period. That orbit lets Hope track daily and seasonal weather cycles, dust storms in the lower atmosphere, and how conditions differ across Martian regions. The mission team called Hope the "first true weather satellite" at Mars.

  Liquid water may once have existed on the Martian surface, but today the atmosphere is so thin that water survives only as ice or vapor. The mission's instruments probe why that change happened and why Mars keeps losing hydrogen and oxygen into space. They also study how the planet's upper and lower atmosphere layers connect. Scientists expect the resulting data to help model how Earth's own atmosphere might evolve over millions of years. All findings are shared with roughly 200 universities and research institutes across the globe.

  That data kept arriving long after the arrival maneuver ended, feeding discoveries scientists were still announcing years later.

• 7. New Discoveries

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  On the 10th of March 2023, a flyby produced the first-ever close-up global images of the Martian moon Deimos, captured by the Hope orbiter.

  In April 2023, The New York Times reported an updated global map of Mars, built from images the Hope spacecraft had collected.

  The International Astronautical Congress convened in Dubai in October 2021, eight months after Hope entered Mars orbit. Organizers had originally planned the gathering for 2020, but shifted it online once the pandemic made an in-person Congress impossible.

  Hope's mission was originally designed to study the Martian atmosphere for two years. Its cameras and spectrometers were still producing new firsts, like the Deimos flyby, well beyond that original timeline.