The United Arab Emirates successfully deploy the probe into orbit around Mars Science & Tech News

The United Arab Emirates is the fifth nation to ever reach Mars. Your spacecraft was successfully launched into orbit around Mars at 3:77 p.m. UK time on Tuesday.

Named Hope in English (Amal in Arabic), the probe completed a difficult maneuver to get into orbit after a seven-month flight covering more than 493 million kilometers after taking off from Tanegashima, Japan.

The Emirates Mars Mission is the first of three space missions slated to reach Mars this month, followed by China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter and lander, and NASA’s Perseverance rover.

The Hope spacecraft fired its six Delta-V engines for 27 minutes to slow it from a cruising speed of 121,000 km / h to just 18,000 km / h. Its scientific instruments have been calibrated and it is ready to descend into its scientific orbit.

The £ 160 million satellite is said to provide a picture of Mars’ atmosphere and study the daily and seasonal changes on the planet, as well as propelling the UAE’s science and technology sector and enabling it to break away from its economic reliance on oil.

The spaceship itself was designed and assembled by researchers at three American universities – the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Scientists believe Mars was once rich in water and possibly life. The UAE Space Agency said, “One of the culprits in turning this planet into a dry, dusty one is climate change and atmospheric loss.”

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The agency’s probe will monitor the Mars weather system, as well as the distribution of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper parts of the Martian atmosphere, so humankind can understand the relationship between weather change and atmospheric loss.

“With three scientific instruments aboard the spacecraft, EMM will provide a series of measurements that are fundamental to a better understanding of circulation and weather in the lower and middle Martian atmospheres,” said the Emirates space agency.

“By combining such data with monitoring the upper layers of the atmosphere, EMM measurements will reveal the mechanisms behind the upward transport of energy and particles and the subsequent escape of atmospheric particles from the gravitational force of Mars.”

The mission makes the United Arab Emirates the first Arab nation to reach Mars and the fifth space agency to get there after the US, Russia, the European Space Agency and India as a whole.

This is followed by the Chinese spaceship Tianwen-1, which is expected to enter Mars orbit in the coming days. A rover landing is expected in April.

Although NASA’s Perseverance rover will arrive on Mars later than Tianwen-1, it will land earlier and has no orbiter component with a scheduled date of February 18.