The Emirates Mission Mars, known as the Hope Probe, will go into orbit around Mars on February 9th.
The mission was one of three launched into Mars from Earth in July, involving NASA’s Perseverance rover and Tianwen-1 mission in China. Hope will orbit the planet, Tianwen-1 will orbit the planet and it will land and perseverance will land on Mars.
All three missions were launched around the same time as a result of an alignment between Mars and Earth on the same side of the sun, making for a more efficient trip to Mars.
When the spacecraft arrives, the Hope Probe marks the UAE as the only fifth country in history to reach the red planet. The mission’s goals do not stop there.
The probe, along with its three scientific instruments, is expected to create the first complete picture of the Martian atmosphere. The instruments will collect various data points on the atmosphere to measure seasonal and daily changes.
This information will give scientists an idea of what the dynamics of climate and weather are like in different layers of the Martian atmosphere. Together, this sheds light on how energy and particles, such as oxygen and hydrogen, move through the atmosphere and how they even escape to Mars.
“We need to do more to quantify that loss and to understand how the rest of the atmosphere affects that loss from a global perspective.”
The mission team said the spacecraft is very healthy and behaving exactly as it should in the days before their arrival at a press conference Thursday.
Going up to reach the mission to Mars has been an emotional roller coaster, said Her Majesty Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri, chairman of the UAE Space Agency and minister of state for advanced sciences in the UAE.
“Every point of celebration is followed by a number of points of concern awaiting the next points of celebration,” she said.
“On the other hand, one of our mission goals was to inspire many students and society as a whole within STEM. And we have seen a major shift in the minds of students, first and foremost, in terms of But we’ve also seen a lot of enthusiastic commitment within the region, an area that is generally unstable, and which has inspired a lot of ideas about what is possible. “
Reaching Mars
The Hope Probe moves so fast towards Mars that if it doesn’t slow down properly when it arrives, the spacecraft literally uses Mars’ gravity to drag it through deep space.
Nearly half of the spacecraft’s fuel will be used to slow it down until the spacecraft is captured by Mars gravity and enters orbit.
Burning its thrushes for 30 minutes before it reaches Mars, it slows from a speed of more than 75,185 miles per hour to 11,184 miles per hour.
For information, when the Perseverance rover arrives in Mars on February 18, it will reach the top of the Martian atmosphere at over 12,000 miles per hour and has only seven minutes to deceive to land on the surface.
The Hope Probe team is considering this stage of the spacecraft’s arrival at Mars, known as the Mars Orbit Entry level, is just as urgent and dangerous as the launch of the spacecraft. And as Perseverance largely lands on Mars without any intervention from NASA, Hope will be able to handle any issues and take care of himself, to some extent.
As soon as Hope establishes an orbit around Mars, it will communicate with Earth through an earth station in Spain. A one-way light time between Mars and Earth takes between 10 and 11 minutes, so the signal is delayed.
“Less than half of the spacecraft sent to Mars have been successfully made,” said Pete Withnell, program manager for the mission at the lab for Atmospheric Physics and Space. “But this is a very active event, full of imitation and analysis. I can’t think we are better prepared than we are now.”
Capturing a new perspective
After Mars’ gravity captures Hope, it enters an elliptical orbit around the planet, reaching as close as 621 miles above the Martian surface and as far as 30,683 miles from it. It takes about 40 hours to hopefully complete one orbit.
The probe will return the first image of Mars during this time.
Hope in this phase, known as the capture orbit, will remain between February and mid-May at the mission’s transition stage, according to Brain.
During this move, the ground crews will send some commands to the spacecraft to test the instruments and to check on Mars to see if any of the tweaks are needed. instruments.
Then, it will be time to move hope into the orbit of science which allows the researcher’s instruments to begin capturing scientific data of Mars.
Hopefully will end one scientific orbit of the planet every 55 hours. This orbit will provide the first global image of weather and atmospheric dynamics on Mars, which will be shared with the scientific community through the mission’s data center.
The mission is expected to run for two years, with scope extended for a third year.
The probe will be in a different orbit from a spacecraft that has visited Mars.
“It’s a very high altitude orbit, much higher than any other Mars science missions,” Brain said. “In that high orbit, where our instruments monitor Mars from a global perspective, we always see about half of Mars no matter where we are in orbit when we look. us on the planet. “
The orbit brings the probe approximately parallel to the Martian equator, allowing the spacecraft to capture different times of the day on the planet. And because it is an elliptical orbit, or oval shape, that means that observations are captured near and as far away from Mars.
“It can observe many geographical regions at one time of day when the entire probe approaches and accelerates Mars, and can depend on the speed at which Mars spins on its axis. , “Brain said.” It can move over one geographical area like the great volcano, Olympus Mons, and study the atmosphere there at many times of the day. “
Every nine days of the mission, the probe will have captured a picture of the Martian atmosphere completely.
“We’ll have seen every geographic area at all times of the day, every nine days,” Brain said.