The UAE wants to rewrite what we know about weather on Mars
A nagging problem with planets is that they are just so large: Send a spacecraft to one patch of a planet and inevitably, some of the things you learn will apply only right there. That struggle is particularly difficult when scientists ponder a planet’s atmosphere and weather. By definition, these are global phenomena, and they interact with other global phenomena in intricate ways. That conundrum is why, despite a rich history of spacecraft observations of Mars, scientists are still puzzling over how the planet’s atmosphere really works — from top to bottom, pole to pole, and dawn to dusk and back again.
If all goes well, a mission from a country that’s a newcomer to planetary science will soon begin to gather the data scientists need for a truly global understanding of the Martian atmosphere. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) plans to launch its first interplanetary spacecraft, called the Emirates Mars Mission or Hope, on Tuesday (July 14), with lift-off scheduled for 4:51 p.m. EDT (2051 GMT). Then, the $200 million mission will embark on a seven-month cruise to Mars, slipping into orbit around the Red Planet in early 2021. Hope is scheduled to observe Mars for at least a full Martian year (a bit less than two Earth years) as it works to understand the Martian atmosphere. If the spacecraft successfully arrives — which the team well knows is a difficult proposition — the UAE will become the fifth or sixth entity to orbit Mars, depending on how the mission’s timeline compares with that of China’s Tianwen-1 Mars lander, also launching this summer.
A dozen orbiters have worked at Mars before, and Hope was purposefully designed with an eye to the half-century-long history of spacecraft sent to Mars. Nevertheless, mission personnel wanted to avoid the risk of staying within the limits of what other projects have done. “We always learn from previous missions,” Mariam Al Shamsi, director of the space science department at the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, which runs the Hope mission, told Space.com. “There is no perfect mission, so every mission that comes up learns from the previous missions.” In the case of Hope, the mission learned particularly from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, scientists said. “The science of the mission is very complimentary to other missions that went to Mars,” Hessa Al Matroushi, science data and analysis lead for the mission at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center, told Space.com. “But it complements them, it adds more understanding to the gaps that had been shown.”