This Sunday (19), the first successful launch of a space mission from the Emirados Arabes Unidos (UAE) towards Mars, which is taking a probe to the red planet that will study the change of seasons over the course of a year, marking the beginning of an ambitious space plan by the Arab country. 1e5r2j
Call of Hope (Hope in Portuguese translation), the probe was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center, in Japan, with the aid of the Japanese H-IIA rocket. It will spend the next seven months sailing through deep space towards Mars and, in mid-February 2021, will attempt a maneuver to place itself in an elongated orbit around Mars, where it will analyze the planet's atmosphere and climate. throughout each day.
The space program project Emirados Arabes Unidos was conceived in 2014 as a way to inspire the country's youth and at the same time commemorate the 2021th anniversary of the founding of the UAE, which will take place in December XNUMX.
For this reason, the success of the launch is cause for much celebration, since for the probe to be in Mars orbit on the 50th anniversary, the launch needed to happen successfully in the window between July and August, in the period when Earth's orbits and Mars around the sun are closer together. This approach only occurs once every 26 months, so if the launch was not a success it would be impossible for the probe to reach the red planet before December 2021.
According to Yousef Al Otaiba, UAE Ambassador to the United States, the success of the launch was the result of years of dedication by the entire team, which allowed the idea of sending a rocket into space to become a reality in just six years.
UAE probe challenges 4p2q1l
Although the launch went without problems, there is still a long way to go before the mission can be considered a success. The first of these will be to reach Mars: About a month from now, engineers from the country's space program will need to make the first course correction of the rocket, to ensure that the probe arrives on the planet.
According to Pete Withnell, one of those responsible for the mission, sending the probe towards Mars it's equivalent to an archer trying to hit a 2mm diameter target from a kilometer away, and so any slight error in the calculations can put Hope on a trajectory far away from where she's supposed to be.
But the biggest challenge of all is expected to come in February, when the probe is expected to arrive in orbit Mars. At this point, the probe must not only maintain the entry trajectory calculated by the station, but also reduce its speed from 121 km/h to 18 km/h in order to bring its movement in line with the planet's rotation. And worst of all: this must be done without any assistance from the team on Earth, since at this point in the trip the probe will be so far away that any command sent from the base will not arrive with the necessary speed for this type of maneuver.
Even so, the success of the launch is something that should be greatly celebrated by the country, since it is rare for this type of mission to succeed in the first place - especially for a country that has never launched anything other than Earth observation satellites into space (such as the used to monitor the weather or take cartographic photos like the ones we see in Google Earth).
If everything goes right, the mission of the Emirados Arabes Unidos it should be the first of three missions that should take advantage of the close orbits of Earth and Mars to launch missions to the red planet. The next mission will take place on July 23, when China is expected to send an orbital probe, one of the lander (which lands on the planet and carries out studies in the area around where it landed) and a rover (a “cart” that explores the surface of the planet). And soon after, the NASA should send the rover Perseverance (Perseverance in Portuguese), which will look for evidence that there was once life on Mars.
Source: The Verge
