The United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter is about to arrive at Mars SPACE 5 February 2021 By Leah Cran
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SPACE 5 February 2021
By Leah Crane
The Hope Mars orbiter will be able to observe the entire planet every 9 Martian days
Alexander McNabb/MBRSC
The Hope orbiter is arriving at Mars. The uncrewed spacecraft is the United Arab Emirates’ first interplanetary mission and will enter orbit on 9 February, after which it will start to build the most complete picture of the Martian atmosphere we’ve ever had.
“The team has prepared as well as they can possibly prepare to reach orbit on Mars,” said Sarah Al-Amiri, the chair of the UAE space agency and the science lead for the mission, during a press conference on 28 January. That preparation is crucial – it will take 11 minutes for a signal from Hope to reach Earth, so the entire operation to enter Mars’s orbit will be on auto-pilot. If anything goes wrong, the orbiter is pre-programmed to deal with various problems by itself during the 27 minutes the thrusters will fire to put the spacecraft into a stable orbit.
“By the time we see the start of the burn, it’s already almost halfway complete,” said Pete Withnell at the University of Colorado Boulder, a programme manager for the mission, during the press conference. “We are observers, and we get to see what’s happening, but we do not interact in real time.”
Watching the spacecraft’s delayed signals will be nerve-wracking, says Omran Sharaf at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai, another programme manager. “Firing the thrusters for 27 minutes nonstop is something we haven’t done before,” he says. “We couldn’t test it on Earth because if we did, we could have damaged the spacecraft, so we could only test it for a few seconds.” Even the small manoeuvres that the craft has performed on its way to Mars only required the thrusters to fire for a minute or less.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2266796-the-united-arab-emirates-hope-orbiter-is-about-to-arrive-at-mars/#ixzz6laZGM13j
