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Mohsen Al Awadhi is Director of Space Missions at the UAE Space Agency.He contributed this article to Space.com’s Voice of the Experts: Columns and Insights.
At the UAE Space Agency, our work over the past three years has focused on an incredible technology: our Hope probe.
As the first Emirati spacecraft to go into space, our probe is emblematic of the incredible technological innovation we have witnessed in the scientific community over the past few decades and will give us a deeper understanding of life on Earth Mars and its atmosphere. Behind it, an incredible Emirati team with the highest scientific qualifications is managing the planning, management and implementation of the project. hope detector project.
The data we have collected so far from the UAE Mars mission has helped shape a new understanding of the red planet’s atmosphere, with major discoveries in new aurora The Nozomi probe successfully captured it. These discoveries have led to 13 newly published papers, several impressive high-tempo images of Martian auroras, and ultimately the discovery of several new phenomena while confirming previous hypotheses.
As the first Arab and Islamic Mars rover comprising an Emirati team with the highest scientific qualifications, we have become one of only five nations to have successfully reached and studied Mars.Not only are we incredibly proud of what this means for the UAE’s space on the global stage, but we are also delighted that we were able to gather valuable data that will give us greater insight into problem solving EarthWhether it is climate change or food safety.
related: UAE’s Hope Mars Orbiter: Arab World’s First Interplanetary Mission
New discoveries and phenomena observed
Despite only entering space three years ago, our probes have acquired a high cadence of images and data. Perhaps most notably, our Hope rover captured high-tempo images of Mars’ aurora.
The images captured by the Nozomi rover are not only visually stunning, but also important for further understanding Atmosphere of the red planet, while providing stunning images of the space, demonstrating the impressive technology devised by our community. Of the three auroras captured by probes, our spacecraft even captured complex images of the notoriously enigmatic Scattered Aurora.
The observations of these two diffuse aurora, in the strong solar storm Discrete auroras, along with a third type of aurora, the proton aurora, mean that our Nozomi rover has successfully observed auroras both at night and during daytime on Mars. Most importantly, the images of dappled and discrete auroras, atomic hydrogen, and clouds of Martian water ice make EMM the first Mars mission capable of characterizing daily variations in the Martian atmosphere within and across seasons.
Since the Hope probe entered space, it has made great contributions to the scientific community. It published 13 new papers in a special issue titled “First Results from the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM)” through the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).
The EMM science team was able to publish several papers covering key data and discoveries captured by the scientific instruments onboard the Hope rover, including the Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer (EMIRS), the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) and the Emirates Exploration Imager (EXI).
These papers include studies of the current state of the Martian atmosphere, Earth’s climate, and various natural phenomena such as sandstorm, atmospheric waves and large-scale dynamics. They also focused on thermal tidal migration in the atmosphere, emission of Martian sunlight, diurnal variation, the spatiotemporal structure of far-ultraviolet Martian sunlight, comprehensive analysis of hydrogen and oxygen emissions, various types of aurora, and many other phenomena on Mars. These papers also highlight the lower atmosphere and its variation by day, season, and year, the visual appearance of dark and light surfaces, atmospheric phenomena including clouds, fog, dust, and water ice clouds, and meandering discrete auroras.
related: UAE hopes for Mars mission in photos
change orbit to Deimos
In addition to its original mission, our Kibo probe has now changed its orbit slightly and is capturing information about Deimos, the smaller and outermost of Mars’ two natural satellites. What can be confirmed is that this is not a new orbit, but a slight change that offers a better opportunity to learn more about Deimos.
On its new journey to capture insights from Deimos, the probe will move as close as 90 miles (150 kilometers) to the moon, allowing the probe’s EXI, EMUS and EMIRS instruments to capture a high cadence of images and images. Observations.
Deimos orbits Mars in a much larger orbit, completing one revolution around Earth every 30 hours – so no small feat! We hope our probe will capture some new images of Deimos that we haven’t seen before and contribute to a deeper understanding of this mysterious and elusive natural satellite. In the long run, Deimos is less observed than the red planet’s second, larger moon, Phobos.
As I mentioned at the beginning, at the space agency, we’re incredibly proud of the work we’re doing with Hope to find out about our solar system and science beyond our planet. We’ve seen these discoveries in action on our planet. In June 2022, the Hope scientific team participated in the 7th Symposium on Mars Atmospheric Modeling and Observation held by Sorbonne University. In addition to global climate model data, the workshop focused on understanding Mars climate observations and observations from the Nozomi rover. It is this fundamental understanding of other planets that will allow us to better understand our own.
The space economy is great for providing deeper insights into addressing climate change, food security, and national security issues, and has been serving as an innovation incubator on issues that threaten life on Earth Earthwe hope that, in collaboration with our global scientific community, our Hope spacecraft will continue to make significant contributions to this knowledge base.
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