In a first, UAE spacecraft blasts off to Mars from Japan | Hacker News Reader

In a first, UAE spacecraft blasts off to Mars from Japan

smh.com.au

83 pointsaaron69515 comments

Here's some more info [1]:

>The scientific objectives for the Hope Mars Mission, as agreed upon by the global Mars science community, are aimed at providing a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere. The probe will study the climate daily and through seasonal cycles, the weather events in the lower atmosphere such as dust storms, as well as the weather at different geographic areas of Mars. According to the Hope Mars Mission team, the probe will be the "first true weather satellite" at Mars.[25]

>The Hope probe will also study the atmospheric layers of Mars in detail and will provide data to study: the reason for a drastic climatic change in the Martian atmosphere from the time it could sustain liquid water to today, when the atmosphere is so thin that water can only exist as ice or vapour, to help understand how and why Mars is losing its hydrogen and oxygen into space, and the connection between the upper and lower levels of the Martian atmosphere.[25] Data from the Hope probe will also help to model the Earth's atmosphere and study its evolution over millions of years.[20] All data gained from the mission will be made available to 200 universities and research institutes across the globe for the purpose of knowledge sharing.[20]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_Mars_Mission#Hope_spa...

I saw somewhere that the UAE space program is more than 70% under the age of 35, which is interesting. Where I saw that, I don’t remember the source, it also looked like the space program is opening a cultural dynamic among school age children in the UAE to encourage increased interests in math and science for hope of joining the program.

The project manager for HOPE is 36 and has a few missions of experience as an engineer. They have domestic facilities and capabilities now, but their first partner for Building satellites and knowledge transfer was A Korean aerospace startup. So virtually nobody there was trained in a traditional large space agency ecosystem although of course now they have many good working relationships with them. Definitely an agency to watch!

Neil deGrasse Tyson pushed for this at WGS 2018, maybe they actually listened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_m1mPtYzTk

This article is 5 sentences long. Here's a better one: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/science/emirates-mars-mis...

That one is 0 sentences long because of paywall.

Just tbc, when they say monitor climate change, they mean seasonality right?

They mean the historic climate change that caused Mars to lose all its water.

First ever, and go to Mars? Pretty ballsy.

It's their first interplanetary mission, not their first satellite.

There's very few other nearby options and Venus is harder to reach than Mars despite being closer most of the time.

A Reuters report on this mentioned there are two other Mars missions being launched this year from China and the US, so it looks like it’s the place to be.

Will be interesting to see how the data can be used as a whole from the three missions.

The lowest energy means to get to Mars is to use the Hohmann Transfer Orbit and the launch window comes about approximately every 2.1 years. Therefore, you’ll tend to see missions from different agencies all launch close together. More complex missions using gravity assists or relying on certain alignments etc are more variable in timing.

I get the feeling it was a pretty international effort.

First of this launch window (2020) for the expedition to Mars.

Fight Island wasn't enough, next up is Fight Planet.

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