Top government officials unveiled plans for UAE and the Muslim world first Mars mission called “hope” or Amal in Arabic.
The mission aims to provide global picture of the Martian atmosphere through an unmanned probe to be launched in July 2020 to reach Mars in 2021, according The Gulf News.
“Our science mission is to produce the first ever truly global picture of the Martian atmosphere. This is the first holistic study of the Martian climate and how the layers of atmosphere fit together,”
Omran Sharaf, Emirates Mars Mission Project Manager, said in the video of the Emirates Mars Mission.
A purely Emirati team composed of 150 engineers and scientists will work on the mission. According to the video posted about the mission but we do not know if that involves the rocket it self rather than just the space craft.
The mission journey to Mars will take around seven months.
The Mars mission aims to analyze the Martian climate in order for the scientists to better understand the Red Planet, the Earth in the future millions of years from now, and other planets that have yet to be discovered. “We will model the connections between all the different components of the Martian climate including all the temperatures, winds, dust, and clouds,” said Sarah Amiri, Deputy Project Manager, Science Lead to Gulf News.
“First, this will help us to model Earth’s atmosphere and how it will evolve with time over millions of years. Second, it will allow us to analyze newly discovered planets far across the galaxy to be able to determine if there is life on it,” she added.
“Scientists on earth will use the data that will be sent by the probe to build a complete dynamic picture of the Martian climate. This is something that has never been seen before,” Sharaf said.
All data that will be sent from the prober will be made available to 200 universities and research institutes–the UAE’s contribution to human knowledge-
The epic 60 million-kilometer journey makes UAE the ninth country to join the ‘global Martian club’ with the likes of the US, Russia, China, Japan, India and France with missions to explore the Red Planet.
The UAE’s investments in space technologies already exceed Dh20 billion.
The mission is unnamed which will offer besides deepening human knowledge about Mars, the data will also help climate scientists understand changes in Earth’s atmosphere over millions of years.
Here is the video of the mission with the details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRvjjcuLaZE
The news of the story surfaced on Al Jazeera, were most commenters where against it stating its a waste of resources, where these resources can be better used in feeding Muslim refugees or opening factories to hire the unemployed Muslim youth some saying that the finance would Emarati but the building would be western.
While they have a point of view but the video of the mission said that the mission will be done 100% by Emirates, which is a good thing in building Arab/Muslim science and technology skills. Though, it is important that the mission builds and designs its own rocket for launching.
Godspeed and may the mission be successful 🙂