In 2020, the UAE's space agency launched its first Mars mission, less than a decade after it was created. How did they manage it?
on 19 July 2020, a few months into a global pandemic that had paralysed the world, a rocket shot into the sky from the Japanese space launch site on its southern island of Tanegashima.
Aboard was a small spacecraft, a little over 2m (6.5ft) wide and weighing about as much as a Ford Focus car. Onboard it was a host of cameras and spectrometers vital for its impending mission, one which would take it more than 493 million km (306 million miles) from Earth. Perched on top of its gold body was a large black radio antenna, which would beam its data across the vast, cold abyss of space to controllers sitting at their monitors.
The spaceship was called "Hope". It was not American, Russian, or from the European Union. Hope was the first spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) to travel further than an orbit around the Earth. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft from an Arab nation to reach Mars, and the UAE would become only the fifth nation in the world to successfully put a spaceship in orbit around Mars.
As the United Arab Emirates (UAE) prepared to mark its 50th year, its space agency bet its reputation on putting a spaceship into orbit around Mars on the first attempt, to beam back details of Martian weather that had never been observed before.
Just six years before the launch, the UAE's space agency didn't even exist.
The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) lies at the far end of Dubai International Airport, about half an hour's drive east of the Burj Khalifa. By space centre standards it is relatively compact; you could probably lose it in the car park of Nasa's giant Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
The UAE became only the fifth nation – after the US, Russia, China and India – to reach Mars, and only the second space agency to succeed on the first attempt
The collection of offices, workshops and clean rooms here is the nerve centre of the UAESA, still less than a decade old. It is from here that much of the work to guide the Emirates Mars Mission to the Red Planet was undertaken.
When I visit UAESA, in February 2022, it is a year since Hope had reached the end of its nearly 500-million-km (310-million-mile) journey from Earth on its way to orbit Mars. Even getting to Mars had been some achievement, especially for a space agency with such limited experience. The UAE became only the fifth nation – after the US, Russia, China and India – to reach Mars, and only the second space agency to succeed on the first attempt (after India).
It is one of the space industry's most ambitious newcomers. It was only inaugurated in 2014. A six-year attempt to forge a pan-Arab space programme, modelled on the European Space Agency, failed to materialise. This spurred the UAE to develop its own space agency and may help explain its fast-forward approach ever since.
The UAE had launched seven satellites before its space agency came into being, all of them built by foreign companies such as Europe's EADS, Boeing in the US and South Korea's Satrec Initiative. It was only in 2018 that the nation was able to actually design its own: the KhalifaSat Earth-sensing satellite, which was built by a team of Emirati engineers in South Korea at Satrec Initiative's facilities.
KhalifaSat launched in 2018, was sent into orbit aboard a Proton rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur space drone. Its high-resolution images of Earth taken from some 613km (380 miles) above the Earth could be used for everything from urban planning to disaster relief. But the satellite had other objectives as well – kickstarting a scratch-built space industry in the Emirates.
In February 2022, Omran Sharaf was leading the Emirates Mars Mission. Sharaf, 38, says the inspiration for the mission was the "triple helix model, in which you have the private sector, the government and academics… to have that overlap happening. And not having each sector working as silos."
With this, the UAE had staked its claim on becoming one of the 21st Century's leading space agencies. In the Cold War, such developments would have seemed far-fetched. But space exploration in the 2020s is a very different beast. The space race dominated by the geopolitical rivalry of the US and the Soviet Union has fragmented, and now involves many more players – both commercial entities like America's SpaceX, and upstart agencies from relatively small countries like the UAE.
In previous decades, space programmes that had successfully put satellites into orbit then turned their attention towards our nearest neighbour, the Moon. But not the UAE.
"The UAE had no time to wait and needed to expedite and speed up the building of these capacities. So it looked at Mars to do that," Sharaf says. The deadline was for the mission to achieve Mars orbit before the country celebrated its golden jubilee in October 2021.
The nascent space industry's potential may have been helped by the crash in the Gulf States' aviation sector during the coronavirus pandemic. Long-haul hubs such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi had fallen almost silent as travel bans took hold. In 2018, the aviation sector was responsible for almost a quarter of the country's GDP and was expected to make nearly half by 2030 before the pandemic happened. The country has now had to look at other ways to keep its economy buoyant.
A successful space mission involving Mars is a monumental throw of the dice
The Emirates Mars Mission was not just about waving the UAE flag on the world stage. At the heart of it was the intent to produce the most complete picture of Mars's weather cycles yet observed. The spacecraft would study Mars with three main instruments.
The first was a high-resolution imaging unit able to measure, water, ice, dust and aerosols in the planet's atmosphere. An infrared spectrometer would monitor radiance from the planet's surface and atmosphere, measuring the surface temperature and amounts of dust in the atmosphere. Hope's ultraviolet spectrometer, meanwhile, would measure the planet's entire atmosphere and study its levels of hydrogen and oxygen – the building blocks of water, the key to life.
While more than 30 spacecraft and landers had visited the Red Planet, most had only caught snapshots of the planet's weather. Hope intended to do something much more ambitious, covering an orbit that would allow it to take a global snapshot of the Martian climate, and follow it across the planet's distinct seasonal changes.
Sarah Al Amiri, 35, was the UAE's Minister of State for Advanced Science when I visited Dubai in February; she's since become the country's minister for public education and future technology. She had been obsessed with space since she was a child, but with the Emirates space industry an unlikely proposition, she studied computer engineering instead. By the time she graduated, at age 22, what would become the UAE's space agency had begun to take shape. Al Amiri ended up working as a software engineer on two of the UAE's earlier satellite projects, DubaiSat-1 and 2. By the time UAESA was touting the benefits of Hope's forthcoming mission, Al Amiri was both the project's science lead and also the country's minister for state for advanced sciences.
The UAE's bold approach couldn't mask the fact that producing a successful space mission involving Mars is a monumental throw of the dice; at least half of the 50 missions undertaken since 1960 have failed. In the early 1970s, a frenzied race between the USSR and the US to land the first spaceships on Mars led to several failed missions. Recent attempts have had more success, but Mars remains a challenging destination.
"We comprehended the challenges, we understood the risk moving into this, we understood that the chances of success were 50%, just from historic data," Al Amiri says. "There was also the understanding of the amount of opportunity that will be created on the back of this mission, that far outweighed any apprehension that we personally carried with regards to the delivery," says Al Amiri.
"For us, it was an immense opportunity that we were grateful to be part of… this was a very important programme for the space sector in the UAE, and for science and technology at large within the country.
Dubai's crowded airspace and the congested waters of the Persian Gulf make space launches from the UAE impossible
"Every single person knew that if they did not succeed in achieving their one small task, it could jeopardise the overall programme. That's the sense of accountability that each individual had," says Al Amiri.
"And we needed to have a team that had an internal drive for the success of this mission – understanding not only that it's getting a mission to Mars to do amazing science, it's also about transforming a nation-changing culture, creating a beacon of hope."
Despite their drive, skill and determination, the team faced one enormous setback – Hope was due to launch in 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic began to sweep the globe.
Dubai's crowded airspace and the congested waters of the Persian Gulf make space launches from the UAE impossible. The launch had to take place in Japan. But the impending pandemic caused a flurry of last-minute panic. The UAE had to negotiate with the Japanese government to keep their airspace open long enough to fly Hope out of the UAE. At the same time, Sharaf had to create three different teams – one to prepare the spaceship for travel, one to travel with it to Tokyo (and then go into quarantine), and another to travel beforehand, clear quarantine, and then receive the spacecraft. The only problem? The UAE's space agency didn't have enough team members, so some had to be flown from Lasp (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics) in the US to Dubai to make up numbers. Some spent weeks embedded with the launch crew on Tanegashima.
Hope had to be transported from Dubai aboard a giant Soviet-era Antonov heavy-lifter, carried in an oversized "clean room" container. On touchdown, it was transferred from Tokyo to a southern port, and made its way to the launch facility via barge – a lo-tech solution for a very hi-tech passenger.
The work to launch the spacecraft on time continued, though many of the Hope team had to work from their homes as the UAE went into lockdown. I ask Al Amiri if she hadn't sometimes wished for another 18 months' time, despite the looming deadline for launch.
"Yes," she says, but adds they adjusted to working in the pandemic "very fast". From the get-go, the team was making decisions about which tests they could carry out under lockdown conditions, and which they needed to move. Team members volunteered to head to Japan, even with a quarantine.
"On my end, I was liaising quite a lot with the UAE government across the board, because there were travel bans, speaking to the ambassador from Japan and our ambassador in Japan," says Al Amiri.
"At the height of the pandemic, you're talking to the exact same people that were trying to understand what was going on with the health care system," Al Amiri says. "I would have been very understanding with the individuals that I spoke to with all the headaches that they were going through over the past months, but people were highly cooperative and highly supportive to make this mission happen. At no point did we say, 'Okay, our contingency plan now is to delay the launch, but by two years.' I'm really glad that never crept into the conversation."
Building in a two-year pad just for the possibility that we have a global pandemic? That wasn't on our radar – Brett Landin
The deadline to reach Mars by the time the UAE celebrated its 50th anniversary came with an extra caveat. You can't just launch a mission to Mars any time you like. US space engineer Brett Landin, who worked on the Emirates Mars Mission with a team in the US, underlines just how unforgiving the launch window can be. "You can only go to Mars every two years," he says. "And so you plan for a particular launch opportunity, you know; building in a two-year pad just for the possibility that we have a global pandemic? That wasn't on our radar.
"We asked the team, 'Are you guys willing to go travel and be quarantined in Japan, for I can't remember what it was 13 days, two weeks, where you're basically you're going to be stuck in a room?' And I had no shortage of volunteers who said, 'Oh, heck yes, I'm going. I want to see this launch.' And the Emirati team was the same way. I mean, we just had full support. So yes, it was more challenging, but there's no way we were going to let that stop us."
Al Amiri joined the team who oversaw Hope's final preparations before the launch in Japan, on the isolated spaceport some 43km (27 miles) south of the southern island of Kyushu. The July 2020 launch went entirely to plan, and Hope started its seven-month journey to Mars. The countdown was on for the team at the MBRSC to put Hope into orbit around Mars.
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