UPSC Articles
UAE’s Hope Mission
Part of: GS Prelims and GS- III – Sci & Tech; Space
In news
- The UAE’s first mission to Mars entered its orbit, seven months after the UAE’s ‘Hope Probe’ was launched from Tanegashima in Japan.
Key takeaways
- With this, the UAE has become the fifth country after the US, Russia, China, the EU, and India, to reach the Martian orbit.
- The unmanned spacecraft is called ‘Al-Amal’ — the Arabic word for hope.
- The historic event was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the unification of the UAE’s seven emirates.
- Carrying three instruments, including a high-resolution camera and a spectrometer, the spacecraft is on an orbital mission to collect data on Martian climate dynamics and help scientists understand why Mars’s atmosphere is decaying into space.
- Hope is the UAE’s fourth space mission and first interplanetary one.
- The previous three were all Earth-observation satellites.
- Its overall mission life is one Martian year, which is about 687 days on Earth.
