Science - USA (2020-07-10)

SCIENCE sciencemag.org 10 JULY 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6500 127

PHOTO: MOHAMMED BIN RASHID SPACE CENTRE

T

he United Arab Emirates (UAE), a small

Persian Gulf nation, is on the cusp of a

big breakthrough: joining the United

States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and

India in the elite club of nations that

have successfully sent spacecraft to

Mars. On 15 July, the Emirates Mars Mission

(EMM)—also known as the Hope satellite—is

set to launch on a Japanese rocket, arriving at

the Red Planet in February 2021.

Planners hope the mission will boost UAE

industry and science capacity while also de-

livering sorely needed data on the martian at-

mosphere. “One of the primary objectives of

the mission from the start was to do science

that is relevant to the international commu-

nity,” says Sarah Amiri, Hope’s science lead.

Most of the six spacecraft now at Mars are

in polar orbits that only offer views of the

surface at fixed times of day. But Hope will

be inserted into an inclined orbit that pro-

vides a view of any given point at a different

time on each orbit. A camera and infrared

spectrometer will collect data about dust,

moisture, and ozone in the lower atmo-

sphere, while an ultraviolet spectrometer

will measure carbon monoxide, hydrogen,

and oxygen in the upper atmosphere.

The data will fill in gaps in computer mod-

els of the martian atmosphere, says Francois

Forget, a member of the Hope science team

at the Laboratory of Dynamic Meteorology.

Primed by observations, these global cli-

mate models (GCMs) rely on basic physical

laws to make predictions about the weather

and climate. Yet at Mars, “we observe some

processes which we cannot represent using

our universal equations,” Forget says. For ex-

ample, the models cannot reproduce how at-

mospheric dust is distributed or explain why

some dust storms grow into global events

that completely shroud the planet. Monitor-

ing the atmosphere throughout the day may

help solve these enigmas, Forget says.

Lori Neary, who models the martian at-

mosphere at the Royal Belgian Institute for

Space Aeronomy and isn’t involved with

the mission, is also looking forward to its

data. “The more instruments that are tak-

ing measurements of Mars, the better,” she

says. She hopes the data will help her team

understand daily changes in ozone levels,

which depend strongly on sunlight. Contin-

uous EMM data will help calibrate model

predictions for ozone levels throughout a

martian day.

The mission has given equal weight to

building capacity for space science research

in the UAE. “This mission created exper-

tise in the country in areas we never had

expertise in before,” says Amiri, who was a

program engineer on the UAE’s DubaiSat

satellites before becoming EMM science

lead and, later, UAE’s minister of State for

Advanced Science. Emirati aerospace firms

enhanced their know-how by manufactur-

ing many of Hope’s precision components.

Hope was tested in the nation’s first double-

story clean room, which will now be used

for future projects, including university

built drones and small cube satellites.

The mission has also spurred an inter-

est in science at Emirati universities, which

have launched five new undergraduate sci-

ence programs and a graduate program in

physics. At the University of Sharjah, the

number of students in applied physics and

astronomy has doubled since the start of

the EMM.

A science apprenticeship program, built

into the mission itself, has also helped build

expertise. When the EMM was conceived in

2014, the UAE had only a handful of plan-

etary scientists but plenty of trained engi-

neers. The team realized “the best way was

to retool engineers to think like scientists,”

Amiri recalls. The program matches Emirati

engineers with scientists at partner insti-

tutes. For example, Hessa Al Matroushi, the

EMM data management and analysis lead,

originally trained as an image processing

engineer, but shifted gears by apprenticing

with scientists on NASA’s MAVEN mission,

which studies Mars’s upper atmosphere.

“The experience taught me how to be flex-

ible, how to handle scientific data, filter it

and analyze it,” she says.

Many of the apprentices plan to con-

tinue as space scientists after the mis-

sion. “This is where we see our future,” Al

Matroushi says. j

Sedeer el-Showk is a science journalist in Helsinki.

The Hope satellite will orbit Mars in a way that enables it to see the planet’s surface at all times of day.

By Sedeer el-Showk

PLANETARY SCIENCE

UAE probe aims for Mars—and payoffs on Earth

Even before launch, the Hope satellite has boosted Emirati space science