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.
