Emirates achieves dream of taking Arab people to Mars

Emirates has achieved what only a few years ago seemed impossible. As scheduled by technicians on the afternoon of 9 February, its Al Amal space probe has been captured by the gravitational influence of Mars and has fulfilled the dream of Emirates and the Arab people to reach another planet in our Solar System.

It was neither the technology of Angela Merkel's Germany nor that of Emmanuel Macron's France that single-handedly reached Mars. It was the vision, commitment and effort of a small country in the Persian Gulf, which has committed itself to becoming a leading player in space exploration on a global scale.

The critical manoeuvre of insertion into the Martian orbit of Al Amal, scheduled for 9 February, was supervised from NASA's Deep Space Network Communications Complex, which was confirmed at around 17:30 Spanish peninsular time. Specifically, the operation has been followed from the Spanish station of Robledo de Chavela, near Madrid, located in the facilities of the National Institute for Aerospace Technology (INTA) of the Ministry of Defence.

Two of its parabolic antennas, the 74-metre diameter DSS-63 and the 34-metre diameter DSS-55, were assigned to ensure the smooth running of the manoeuvre, which began at 16:42 and ended at 17:09 (Spanish peninsular time). While this was happening, another Madrid-based antenna, the DSS-54 - also 34 metres long - was following the trajectory of NASA's Mars2020 probe, which is scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet on 18 February.

The Spanish colony in the Emirates has also followed the final journey of the Al Amal probe with interest. Leticia Torres, a lawyer who has been working for six years in a major international law firm in Dubai, has witnessed the pride with which Emirati citizens and expatriates are following the mission's progress.

Leticia Torres stresses that the country's authorities "want to show that they want to stop being just a reference point for oil and business and to be recognised for their scientific contributions and their contribution to the exploration of the solar system". Such is the level of expectation in the country that, for example, on mobile phones, instead of the name or logo of the telephone operator, the logo of the Al Amal mission appears.

In order to be captured by Mars' weak gravity - 62 per cent less than that of the Earth - and begin to rotate around the planet, the spacecraft had to ignite its six small thrusters for 27 minutes. In this way it has managed to gradually reduce its speed from 120,000 to 18,000 kilometres per hour.

It will be placed in an elliptical orbit around Mars at an altitude of between 22,000 and 44,000 kilometres, where it will continue to record the Martian atmosphere and climate and send back 1 Terabit of data until 2023, when the mission will be completed. However, if possible, its work could be extended until 2025.

The operation has been carried out "autonomously", says Ayesha Sharafi, the engineer in charge of the propulsion system. With a distance between Earth and Mars of 190 million kilometres, it takes 11 minutes for the telecommands to arrive in each direction of transmission, which makes it impossible to quickly resolve any anomalies that may occur.

Once insertion has been achieved, technicians at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) have begun to verify that the spacecraft is in perfect condition and have started the process of switching on the three instruments on board. They will then move on to the calibration phase for all of them and in a few weeks' time they will embark on the reason that brought Al Amal into Martian orbit: to study the Red Planet's atmospheric layers and climate for a year.

The navigation phase through the cosmos covered more than 481 million kilometres and lasted 204 days, while insertion into Martian orbit was the most critical moment of the entire adventure. If the spacecraft arrived "at too low a speed, there was a risk of crashing into the planet's surface". On the other hand, if the speed had been too high, "the result is that Al Amal would have passed Mars... and there was no way back," says project manager Omran Sharaf, who can breathe a sigh of relief.

The mission, which is now entering its scientific phase, was announced in July 2014 by Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Emir of Dubai. The spacecraft was conceived, developed and manufactured in the United States with the participation of seven multidisciplinary teams of Emirati engineers and technicians under the leadership of Omran Sharaf. 

With a take-off weight of 1.5 tonnes and dimensions of 2.9 metres high and 2.37 metres wide, its size is similar to that of a small car, with the addition of several solar panels to generate the energy needed to operate its three scientific instruments, which will soon be put into operation.

The first of these is the multi-band EXI camera - an acronym for Emirates eXploration Imager - which has been built at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Its function is to take high-resolution images in the visible and ultraviolet bands and measure the properties of water, ice, dust, aerosols and the amount of ozone in the atmosphere. The Minister of Advanced Technology and Chairman of the Emirates Space Agency, Sarah Al Amiri, is looking forward to the first pictures, which she says "will be spectacular".

The second scientific instrument on board is the Emirates Mars InfraRed Spectrometer (EMIRS) interferometric thermal infrared spectrometer. Built by Arizona State University, its task is to determine temperature, ice, water vapour and dust profiles in the atmosphere. The third is the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS). Built at the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, it is responsible for studying the characteristics and variability of the thermosphere and the hydrogen and oxygen present on Mars.

The Al Amal spacecraft is the first of three missions launched last July to reach the Red Planet. China's Tianwen-1 probe will follow immediately after, on 10 February, and the US Mars2020 will follow on 18 February.