Hope- Launch & Cruise Options

[jekbradbury]

In a Wednesday press conference, officials from the United Arab Emirates announced a Mars orbiter mission named Al-Amal (Hope) for the 2020-21 launch opportunity. There's already a strong Twitter presence (official mission handle: https://twitter.com/UAEMarsMission; the science lead has her bilingual account at https://twitter.com/SarahAmiri1). The probe's website is here and it lists an imager, a UV spectrometer, and an infrared spectrometer as instruments, while LASP at CU-Boulder will be the "lead US scientific-academic partner."

More details here, here, and here on the main English-language Emirati news website.

Always good to see more players get in the planetary exploration game, and while Mars is an ambitious first target the UAE appears to have the partners and funding that a new entrant needs.

[Phil Stooke]

The Emirates Mars Mission is indeed happening. This website:

http://www-mars.lmd.jussieu.fr/granada2017...granada2017.htm

is a set of abstracts for a Mars Atmosphere workshop recently held in Spain. Go down to the very bottom of the page, and there are several abstracts about this mission's instruments. It will be an orbiter, in a very unusual high orbit whose low point is at the orbit of Deimos. Among other things it will take multiple images of the planet with resolutions ranging from roughly 2 to 4 km/pixel for weather and dust storm monitoring. I am trying to find out if imaging of Deimos will be possible, but nothing yet.

There are lots of other interesting things here including discussions of MAVEN, Curiosity etc. and Mars 2020.

The Emirates mission, called Hope, has a website here:

http://www.emiratesmarsmission.ae/

Phil