Hope - UAE's Emirates Mars Mission : Goals - Hurdles

Hope the spacecraft ; credit : MBRSC, UAE

After getting freedom from British in 1971, a small piece of land in the Arab world, UAE, aspires to go beyond Moon in a most inspirational attempts by the modern human kind. This need not to be underestimated from this group of Arabs who boast of : world's tallest building and a driver-less metro. Though established as one of the richest countries per capita, but with the oil wealth sliding and the expensive infrastructure projects which are expected to fuel the economy are on the down trend, the leaders of the nation are looking for some mean of boosting the morale of just around 12% Emiratis, the native Arabs, to get interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Vow.... they made it.... The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai with a humble beginning of developing a earth orbiting satellite with the help of South Korea (2007) has now prepared to a deep space mission to Mars. A bold step taken by UAE’s vice-president and prime minister, Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum in 2014 that they would celebrate the 50th Independence year by going to Mars has been seeing the fruits of seeds sown earlier.

Hope team, Women force; credit : MBRSC, UAE

The UAE's mission to mars is called HOPE ("Amal" in Arabic) or EMM, Emirates Mars Mission. A team very young engineers (all Emiratis) with an unbelievable average age of 27-years were pooled into the Hope's mission primarily to draw the attention of youth towards STEM. Another remarkable aspect of this team is: women make 34% of the total work force and an astonishing 84% of the science team. The science team lead by Sarah Al Amiri, a computer engineer turned Planetary Scientist, with the over all team lead is Omran Sharaf another very young member. As the story of reaching to planet Mars evolved... the seniors picked up exactly the place where they left in taking UAE into Space. They instructed the youngsters to "build the mission" NOT to "buy". Its a wise, tested and well calculated move... they approached University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), which had just completed a successful mission to Mars, the MAVEN spacecraft exploring the Martian atmosphere in one of the finest details. Along with:  University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab (SSL), Arizona State University (ASU) School of Earth and Space Exploration. Another remarkable decision was to go with a solid science goal; for this they approached, the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, an advisory group convened by NASA that includes scientists from around the world.

GOALS:
The Hope mission has its eyes firm on cracking a fundamental issues related to Martian atmosphere. Today, Mars atmosphere is few hundred times less than that of earth's. There are many questions unanswered on what happened to the prevailing atmosphere around Mars that was existing at one time. Mars also has seasons and its own storms erupting around the year.  They got 3-goals set which would enhance the understanding Martian atmosphere as a whole: 1. By measuring the lower atmospheric parameters to understand the climate dynamics on Mars. 2. Role of weather in permitting the loss of Hydrogen (and Oxygen) into higher atmosphere. 3. To understand the structure and variability of Hydrogen (Oxygen) in upper atmosphere to estimate the overall loss of Martian Atmosphere to space.

The most successful (>70%) nation to reach the red planet, USA, has majority of the missions on the ground (rovers), the recent MAVEN (2014) orbiter indeed accomplished a huge success in measuring the various atmospheric parameters and solar flux reaching to the planet. The Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) too had a great deal of success of measuring O, CO, CO2 presence in upper atmosphere by sampling at site employing a mass spectrometer, apart from acquiring few hundreds of pretty pictures of Mars. While both MAVEN (~ 150 X 6,200 km) and MOM (~ 470 X 74,000 km) were in highly elongated orbits and had many other objectives apart from studying the Martian atmosphere; the Hope is completely dedicated to study the lower/upper atmosphere and the interplay among them; ultimately trying to explain the secrets behind the loss of atmosphere. Its planned orbit of around 20,000 X 40,000 km is ideally suited to study Mars on multiple occasions in a day.

Unlike majority of the interplanetary probes which carry variety of instruments to address various scientific goals; Hope carries only 3-types of spectral imagers; meaning these are wavelength based imaging instruments; also capturing visible images of the "Red Planet" at 12-megapixel sensor. They are very powerful tools in providing spatial-scientific information, a unique combination, of late entered into many space missions.

EXI instrument; credit : MBRSC, UAE

In detail: 1. Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) would provide details on the optical depths of dust and water ice in the Martian atmosphere and column abundance of Ozone gas
2. Emirates Mars Infra Red Spectrometer (EMIRS) will provide the details of global distribution of key atmospheric parameters over the Martian daily and yearly, including dust, water ice (clouds), water vapor and temperature profiles
3. EMM Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) measures relative changes in the thermosphere (highest atmospheric layer) and the radial variability of both the Hydrogen and Oxygen.

HURDLES:
Reaching Mars has been among the toughest hurdles for space faring nations. Out of the 57-attempts made by humans around half of them (30) ONLY have made it to Mars. USA is sitting right on top of the mountain of success including the very first probe to reach planet mars (Mariner-4, 1965). India holds the unique distinction of being the very first country to reach Mars in its first attempt. While European Space Agency had a decent rate of success, Russia had to face many failures including one failed attempt in the recent past along with  China (Phobos grunt, Russia-China, 2011). The technological advanced and meticulously working Japan has plans of reaching out to Mars in 2024, the next available celestial window.

As they say "Rocket science" is truly tough nut to crack, the Mars journey involves placing the spacecraft into helio-centric orbit and guiding it towards Mars in the next 8-months. There are dedicated group of people called "mission team".  This group needs to take many crucial decisions in selecting proper helio-centric (around the sun) orbit, making course correction as the spacecraft slips out of its intended orbit. The ultimate test of this team would be would be to perform a kind of  "slamming" of the brakes of spacecraft which is racing almost at the speeds of around 120,000 km/hr to reduce it to 18,000 km/hr. Having captured by planet Mars, the last hurdle for this team would be to park it in the intended orbit.

As a trained spectroscopist, I like to hold my personal reservations on few finer aspects of the imaging spectrographs; though  they have seen the timely tested missions in the recent past (MAVEN) but some of the spectral resolution on EMUS (1.3 nm) are highly ambitious as they demand a very very narrow field of view of 0.14 X 0.2 degree which curtails the throughput (light gathering power) to feeble levels. Again, in my view... this is very meager issue as compared to reaching planet Mars... How sweet that feeling will be?

The Hope spacecraft is planned to be launched from Japan using a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA launcher and is set to arrive at Mars in February 2021.

I wish each and every group member of Hope ... all the very best ... they have demonstrated immense amount of dedication and showed a high level of maturity as narrated by their mentors at LASP (from the interview).

Hope..... to meet you on Planet Mars......

[Like to offer credit to Elizabeth Gibney's article for some of my reference, appearing in Nature .... ]