Emirates strengthens its bid to set foot on the Moon, explore asteroids and build satellites
The Government of the Union of Arab Emirates continues to take firm steps to consolidate its position as the main space country in the Persian Gulf by 2024, both in terms of exploration of the cosmos, observation satellites and manned flights.
At the forefront of the Gulf nation's space ecosystem is the Mohammed Bin Rashid Dubai Space Centre (MBRSC) headed by Salem Humaid Al Marri, which celebrated its 18th anniversary at the end of February. Its Astronaut Corps now has four members, having doubled in number with two new graduates. They are engineer Nora Al Matrooshi, 30, and helicopter pilot Mohammed Al Mulla, 35, who on 5 March received certificates of completion of the NASA training programme.
The two Emirati graduates, along with ten US citizens, belong to the class known as "The Flies". All were selected in 2021 and began training courses in January 2022 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they have been trained in a wide range of skills.
They know how to operate the International Space Station (ISS) systems and equipment, perform activities outside the ISS and operate the Canadarm robotic arm that moves cargo and experiments outside the orbital complex. They have also been prepared to deal with emergency situations and have even been trained to fly a Northrop T-38 Talon jet.
Before arriving at the NASA facility in Houston, Al Matrooshi and Al Mulla underwent a preparatory phase in the Emirates at the aforementioned MBSRC. There they received swimming and diving lessons, intensive sessions to improve their physical endurance capabilities and were introduced to survival methods.
GMV technology for the MBZ-Sat satellite
Both are now qualified for US manned missions. They join the first Emirati astronaut, Hazzaa Al Mansoori, 40, who spent seven days on the ISS in 2019, and Sultan Al Neyadi, 42, who returned to Earth in September after a 185-day stay on the ISS and spending seven hours outside the orbital complex. Expectations are that one of the four will travel to the moon in the second half of the decade on NASA's Artemis IV or Artemis V missions.
In the meantime, the Emirati authorities are looking forward to the second half of the year. By then, the Mohammed bin Zayed satellite, or MBZ-Sat, an Earth observation platform equipped with very high-resolution cameras from the South Korean company Satrec, will take off from the United States on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Officially, it will be dedicated to monitoring environmental changes and helping to improve agricultural production. But it will also carry out border surveillance and other security and defence-related missions.
The head of the MBRSC's engineering department, Amer Al Sayegh, has confirmed that it is the "largest satellite ever built in a Gulf country". The MBZ-Sat was produced and integrated in the UAE with a "very significant contribution" from Emirati companies such as EPI, Falcon Group, Halcon, Rockford Xellerix and Strata. Weighing some 800 kilos, it is "three times more efficient than the KhalifaSat", which weighs 330 kilos and has been in orbit since October 2018.
Spanish industry is also present in the MBZ-Sat through GMV. In competition with companies from other countries, it is finalising the installation in the MBSRC Control Centre in Dubai of the automatic processors for the acquisition and cataloguing of its high-resolution images, as well as the systems for mission programming and planning and for orbital calculation and 2D/3D visualisation.
On the space exploration side, the MBRSC has two major programmes: the Rashid 2 lunar rover and the Mohammed bin Rashid Explorer science probe, whose mission is to dive into the heart of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Landing on an asteroid and trying again on the Moon
MBR Explorer has just completed its Preliminary Design Review (PDR), a check by an independent team. This essentially consists of reviewing the overall design of the probe, its budget, the milestone schedule, as well as the safety aspects designed to mitigate risks. The conclusion is that the MBR Explorer spacecraft has the technical feasibility to proceed with its development process.
Scheduled to take off in March 2028, it will cruise the cosmos for seven years and travel some 5 billion kilometres, a long way that should take it to study seven asteroids and attempt to land in October 2034 on the coded 269 Justitia. Discovered in 1887, it is 50 kilometres in diameter and is a mysterious cosmic rock with a reddish appearance, when most are bluish in colour.
About 2.3 tonnes and electrically powered, MBR-Explorer will fly over asteroid 10253 Westerwald - discovered in 1973, 2.27 kilometres in diameter, comparable in size to Mount Everest; 623 Chimaera, located in 1907 and 44 kilometres in diameter; and 13294 Rockox, first seen in 1998, 5.24 kilometres in diameter and the size of San Francisco Bay. And three other smaller ones have yet to be named.
The director general of the Emirates Space Agency, Salem Butti Al Qubaisi, says the mission "has attracted the interest of researchers from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and scientists from New York University and Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi". The discoveries made by the MBR Explorer could lay the groundwork for future extraction of resources from asteroids, where there are "vast quantities of minerals, including gold, iron and nickel".
The MBRSC remains committed to rolling its 10-kilogram four-wheel-drive vehicle across the lunar surface in 2024 or 2025. A team of about ten mechanical, navigation, communications, computer, thermal control, mobility, electronics and test engineers under the leadership of Hamad Al Marzouki is working on Rashid 2.
MBRSC Director of Operations Adnan Al Rais says his organisation is "negotiating with space agencies and private sector companies to embark Rashid 2 on an upcoming lunar mission". The first Rashid was launched in December 2022 aboard Japan's Ispace's Hakuto-R spacecraft. But the surface module crashed to the lunar soil in April 2023 due to a miscalculation of its altitude control system.