D4 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
As a girl growing up in Abu
Dhabi, one of the United Arab
Emirates, Sarah al-Amiri
looked at an astronomy book
with a photograph of Androm-
eda, the giant galaxy neighboring our Milky
Way.
“I can’t describe it,” Ms. al-Amiri said in
an interview, “but just to realize that some-
thing that was printed on a page was larger
than anything that I’ve ever seen and
dwarfs the planet that I live on.”
When she was in college, there were few
opportunities in the Middle East to pursue
studies of the universe, and Ms. al-Amiri
majored in computer science instead. But
now, the U.A.E. is aiming to inspire its youth
to pursue science and technology careers,
and Ms. al-Amiri has forged a career pursu-
ing the heavens.
Just 33 years old, she is the head of sci-
ence operations and the deputy project
manager for a space probe that the U.A.E.
just sent to Mars.
A rocket lifting a spacecraft called Hope
has begun its journey. The launch is theboldest move yet by a country that is look-
ing to establish a future that will long out-
live its oil wealth, and sees a space program
as one way to accomplish that goal.
Mars has been much in the news in July,
with a once-every-26-month interlude when
Earth and Mars line up to allow robotic
spacecraft to make a relatively quick trip.
After several delays, NASA’s next Mars
rover, Perseverance, with instruments to
search for chemical signs of past life, is
scheduled to launch on Thursday. China
also launched an ambitious mission to
Mars, Tianwen-1, on July 23.
A fourth mission, which would have put a
Russian-European rover named Rosalind
Franklin on Mars, was pushed off the calen-
dar because of technical hurdles that could
not be cleared in time.
Preparations for Hope, the smallest of the
bunch, proceeded smoothly, and it was the
first to be ready for liftoff.
Because the U.A.E. does not yet have its
own rocket industry, it bought the launch for
Hope aboard an H-IIA rocket from Mitsubi-
shi Heavy Industries, a machinery maker in
Japan. Because of bad weather at the
launchpad on an island in Japan, liftoff was
delayed a number of times until it took place
on July 20.
About the size of a Mini Cooper car, Hope
is to arrive in orbit around Mars in Febru-
ary. The spacecraft — which cost about
$200 million to build and launch — will
carry three instruments: an infrared spec-
trometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer and a
camera.
From its high orbit — varying from 12,400
miles to 27,000 miles above the surface —
Hope will give planetary scientists their
first global view of Martian weather at all
times of day. Over its two-year mission, it
will investigate how dust storms and other
weather phenomena near the Martian sur-
face speed or slow the loss of the planet’s
atmosphere into space.
That, however, is not the main reason that
the Emirates government built Hope.
“A lot of you might ask us, ‘Why space?’ ”
Omran Sharaf, the Hope project manager,
said during a news conference on July 9.
“It’s not about reaching Mars.”
Rather, Mr. Sharaf said, the country’s pri-
mary aim is to inspire schoolchildren and
spur its science and technology industries,
which, in turn, will enable the Emirates to
tackle critical issues like food, water, energy
and a post-petroleum economy.
“It’s about starting getting the ball
rolling,” Mr. Sharaf said, “and creating that
disruptive change, and changing the mind-
set.”
The Emirates previously built and
launched three earth-observing satellites,
collaborating with a South Korean manu-
facturer and gradually taking on greater
shares of the engineering. The country
even has a nascent human spaceflight pro-
gram. Last year, the U.A.E. bought a seat on
a Russian Soyuz rocket and sent its first as-
tronaut, Hazzaa al-Mansoori, for an eight-
day stay at the International Space Station.
For the Mars mission, the country took a
similar approach to the earlier satellites by
working with the Laboratory for Atmos-
pheric and Space Physics at the University
of Colorado Boulder, where Hope was built
before being sent to Dubai for testing.By design, Emirati engineers worked
side by side with their counterparts in Boul-
der, learning as they designed and assem-
bled the spacecraft. “One of the require-
ments that the government gave us since
the beginning,” Mr. Sharaf said, “they told
us, ‘You have to build it and not buy it.’ ”
The science piece of the mission was an
even bigger gap to fill for a country without
Mars scientists, which until recently consti-
tuted an unfathomable career choice.
Ms. al-Amiri is the head of science even
though she never formally studied plan-
etary science.
After she graduated college with a com-
puter science degree, the likeliest job
prospects — working at a networking com-
pany performing troubleshooting and
maintenance — did not enrapture her. She
wanted to design and build new things.
She saw a job posting at what is now
known as the Mohammed bin Rashid Space
Center in Dubai. She joined in 2009, work-
ing as an engineer on the satellite pro-
grams. When that assignment wrapped up
in 2014, she moved on to her current roles on
the Hope mission.
She now also serves as the country’s min-
ister of state for advanced sciences and
chairs an advisory council of scientists.
If the U.A.E. had tried to train planetary
scientists from scratch to work on Hope, the
mission would have been long over before
the scientists were ready. Instead, Emirati
officials took a quicker approach: convert-
ing some of the space center’s engineers
into scientists by offering apprentice-like
training with researchers in the United
States.
“I was put there to develop scientific tal-
ents within the organization and be able to
transfer knowledge in a nontraditional
way,” Ms. al-Amiri said.
The coronavirus outbreak tossed in more
challenges.
Once construction of the spacecraft was
complete in Colorado, a large Ukrainiantransport plane ferried it to Dubai, where it
was to undergo a round of testing before
heading to the launchpad in Japan.
But at the end of February — not long be-
fore the European Space Agency and Rus-
sia postponed the launch of the Rosalind
Franklin mission in part because of the lo-
gistical hurdles created by the pandemic —
Mr. Sharaf and Ms. al-Amiri realized the
outbreak could disrupt their carefully
planned schedules if airports were shut
down.
“Based on that, we started working on a
plan to get the team across to Japan as soon
as possible,” Ms. al-Amiri said.
They shuffled some of the tests in order to
hurry the spacecraft to Japan, three weeks
earlier than originally planned, and where
some of the testing would instead be com-
pleted.
Travel restrictions meant team members
could not travel back and forth. A small
team went ahead in early April to wait out a
quarantine. Two weeks later, the cargo
plane with Hope flew to Japan with another
small team from the Emirates.
In Japan, the people who flew with Hope
then went into quarantine, and then those
who had gone ahead joined the spacecraft
on the barge trip to the island that is home to
the launch site.
Mr. Sharaf and Ms. al-Amiri said the na-
tion’s space program would continue re-
gardless of the mission’s ultimate outcome.
“The Emirates fully understand the risk
associated with this mission,” Mr. Sharaf
said. “So does the team. Let’s be honest.
Fifty percent of the missions that have been
to Mars have failed.”
The greatest success is the training of the
people, he said.
“For the Emirates, it’s more about the
journey,” Mr. Sharaf said. “It’s more about
the impact. Reaching there is one of the
goals. But that doesn’t mean that the mis-
sion has failed, if we didn’t manage to get
there. So failure is an option.”The U.A.E. Pins Its Future
To an Orbiter Called Hope
The Emirati government sees its space program as a way to steer its young people toward careers in
science and technology, helping to build a country that thrives in a post-petroleum economy. By KENNETH CHANG
KHUSHNUM BHANDARI/BLOOMBERGSend a robotic spacecraft to Mars,
grab some rocks and dirt and
bring those back to Earth.
How hard could that be?
It’s more like an interplanetary
circus act than you might imag-
ine, but NASA and the European
Space Agency think that now is
the time they can finally pull off
this complex choreography, toss-
ing the rocks from one spacecraft
to another before the samples
finally land on Earth in 2031.
“The science community, of
course, has lusted after doing this
for quite some time,” said James
Watzin, the director of the Mars
exploration program at NASA.
Over decades, robotic explorers
have revealed an increasingly
complex picture of Mars, but
planetary scientists are limited by
the amount of science that can be
packed in a spacecraft.
“You can only carry so much
instrumentation into the field,
robotically,” Mr. Watzin said. “To
really get into some of the really
intriguing questions at a detail
level means we need to parse the
evidence down on the molecular
level and try to tease the informa-
tion out of very, very old material.
And that requires a whole suite of
instrumentation that was clearly
too large to shrink and send to
another planet.”
With fresh Mars rocks on
Earth, more scientists will be able
to examine them, employing the
most sophisticated equipment in
laboratories around the world.
The first step of this epic under-
taking, known as Mars sample
return, starts soon with Persever-
ance, the next NASA rover. It is
scheduled to liftoff on Thursday,
headed for Jezero, a crater that
was once a lake about 3.5 billion
years ago, and is a promising
place where signs of past life on
Mars could be preserved.
One of the key tasks for Perse-
verance is to drill up to 39 rock
cores, each a half-inch wide and
2.4 inches long, that look interest-
ing enough to merit additional
scrutiny on Earth. Each sample of
rock and dirt, weighing about half
an ounce, will be sealed in an
ultraclean cigar-size metal tube.
But initially, NASA had no plans
to bring those tubes back to
Earth. Perseverance has no way
of flinging the rocks off Mars.
Three years ago, a team of
engineers at NASA’s Jet Propul-
sion Laboratory in California
began taking a closer look at
when the return part of Mars
sample return could be undertak-
en. They considered the possibil-
ity of launching the retrieval
spacecraft in 2026 with the sam-
ples returning three years later.
That timeline, they found, wastoo ambitious. But if the landing
on Earth was pushed back to
2031, the schedule appeared to be
feasible. “We actually feel like we
could do this,” Mr. Watzin said.
The Trump administration’s
budget request for NASA for
fiscal year 2021 included $233
million to continue development,
two years after the agency re-
ceived $50 million for the initial
studies. Last month, the 22 mem-
ber nations of the European
Space Agency gave the go-ahead
on the collaboration with NASA.
“We’ve kind of transitioned
from a ‘yeah, someday these
samples will get picked up’ to
‘yeah, they might get picked up
pretty soon,’ ” said Kenneth Far-
ley, the project scientist for Perse-
verance.
Space agency officials have not
yet announced a total price tag,
but the cost is expected to run
several billion dollars.
If everything goes to plan, two
spacecraft will blast off to Mars in- One will be a NASA-built
lander that will be the heaviest
vehicle ever put on the surface of
Mars. It will be carrying a rover,
built by the Europeans, to fetch
the rock samples, and a small
rocket that will launch the rocks
to orbit around Mars.
The lander will take a round-
about trajectory to Mars, arriving
in August 2028, the beginning of
the Martian spring. The solar-
powered fetch rover will then roll
off the lander, collect at least
some of the rock samples and
bring them back and transfer
them to the lander. The samples,
in turn, will be robotically moved
to the top of the Mars ascent
vehicle, the rocket that will
launch the rocks off Mars.
The second spacecraft, the
Earth Return Orbiter, will be built
by the European Space Agency. It
will take a quicker path to Mars,
pulling into orbit before the land-
er’s arrival. That will allow the
orbiter to serve as the relay for
communications from the lander
as it zooms to the surface.
The launch of the ascent vehi-
cle will deposit a container, aboutthe size of a soccer ball, with the
rock samples circling around
Mars about 200 miles above the
surface. The orbiter then has to
find this container, like a baseball
outfielder chasing down a fly ball.
The orbiter will be tracking the
launch of the rocket, but for sim-
plicity, the container does not
possess any thrusters or a radio
beacon. It is, however, white,
which should make it easier to
spot in the darkness of space.
“This is obviously one of the
key issues: How do you find it?”
said Brian K. Muirhead, who is
leading the sample return design
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.“Once you know where its orbit is,
it’s very easy to match orbit.”
A door on the orbiter will open.
A 1,000-pound contraption within
the orbiter then rotates and slides
the container to the proper config-
uration within the spacecraft,
taking care to seal off the possibil-
ity that anything from Mars could
contaminate anything outside of
the sample container.
The orbiter would then depart
Mars. As it approached Earth, it
would eject the samples, now
mounted within what is called the
Earth entry vehicle, on a collision
course with the Utah desert.
The scientific cargo — rocks
and dirt, which are not fragile —
will easily survive that impact.
If one piece breaks, the sample
return mission does not necessar-
ily fail. Perseverance will most
likely drop some of the sample
tubes on the ground in case it
suffers a malfunction later in the
mission. If the fetch rover breaks,
then Perseverance could bring
samples to the lander instead.
Even if the orbiter fails, its
container of samples could circle
Mars for years until a spacecraft
could be sent to catch it.
“That’s been my job as the
architect,” Mr. Muirhead said. “To
think through the process from
the concept of operations, develop
the concepts that can achieve the
objectives of the different phases
and make sure there’s good mar-
gins built in everywhere. So that
the design isn’t fragile.”SNAGGING MARS ROCKS
Our Greatest
Interplanetary
Circus Act
By KENNETH CHANG
EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKKARIM SAHIB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESRight, Sarah al-Amiri, the
head of science operations
and the deputy project
manager for the Emirates
Mars Mission, the United
Arab Emirates’ first space
mission. Its Hope
spacecraft launched on July
20, below, aiming to arrive
in Mars’s orbit in February.
“For the Emirates, it’s more
about the journey,” said
Omran Sharaf, the Hope
project manager, bottom
with Ms. al-Amiri, right, at a
ceremony unveiling the
mission in 2015.
MIGUEL PORLAN