Hope arrives, and the Arab world reaches another planet
The UAE had no deep-space programme six years before a 27-minute burn spent half of Hope's fuel to capture the first interplanetary mission flown by any Arab nation.
At 15:30 UTC on 9 February 2021 six 120-newton thrusters lit and burned for twenty-seven minutes. Radio took ten minutes forty seconds to cross the gap, so controllers in Dubai heard the burn start when it was already two-fifths over. Capture consumed about 400 of the 800 kilograms of hydrazine Hope carried from Earth.
The United Arab Emirates had no deep-space programme six years earlier. Hope — Al-Amal — was announced in 2014, launched on a Japanese H-IIA from Tanegashima on 19 July 2020, and cost around 200 million dollars. It was built with three American institutions: the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Colorado, Arizona State and Berkeley. Critics said the Emirates had bought a mission rather than built one; the answer was that Emirati engineers worked alongside the American teams, and the programme existed to seed an aerospace sector in an economy running on oil that will not last.
The science case rests on the orbit. Most Mars orbiters fly low and fast, crossing any spot at about the same local time every pass, which suits mapping but not weather. Hope settled into an ellipse of about 20,000 by 43,000 kilometres, period 55 hours. From there it sees most of the disc at once and works through every hour of the Martian day at every longitude about every nine days, building a global record of dust, water vapour, ozone and temperature across a full Martian year.
Its ultraviolet spectrometer recorded discrete aurora, patchy glows tracing where Mars's scattered crustal magnetic fields funnel solar electrons into the air, and a sinuous aurora thousands of kilometres long with no settled explanation. In 2023 Hope passed within about 100 kilometres of Deimos, the closest since Viking in 1977; the spectra suggested the moon is Mars-like material rather than a captured asteroid.
In April 2023 the UAE extended the mission by a year. Hope's data go into a public archive with no proprietary period for the teams who built the instruments.