Hope launch

First Mars mission from UAE aims to inspire a new generation of space scientists

The Hope orbiter will conduct a two-year survey of the weather on the red planet.

A Japanese H-IIA rocket lifts off with the Hope spacecraft, a Mars orbiter developed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in the United Arab Emirates.

Photograph by The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images
Editor’s note: The UAE Space Agency has confirmed that the Hope probe successfully entered orbit around Mars on February 9, 2021.

In the early morning hours of July 20 on Tanegashima, a small island just off the southern coast of Kyushu, Japan, a 174-foot rocket roared to life and lifted a spacecraft on the first leg of a 306-million-mile journey to Mars.

The spacecraft itself, however, is not Japanese. Called al-Amal, or “Hope,” it was designed and managed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in the United Arab Emirates. Safely separated now from the Japanese rocket, the probe will fire its own thrusters to leave Earth orbit for Mars in about 28 days, arriving in February 2021 to complete the first interplanetary voyage initiated by an Arab country.

“It was an indescribable feeling,” Sarah al-Amiri, the UAE’s minister of advanced science

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