The Emirates Mars Mission is a United Arab Emirates Space Agency robotic space exploration mission to Mars. The Hope orbiter was launched on 19 July 2020, and reached Mars on 9 February 2021. On 9 February 2021, the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country and the fifth country in the world to reach Mars and the second country to successfully enter Mars’ orbit on its first try.
The spacecraft entered the Red planet on Tuesday, 9th February 2021 and sent the first picture on Sunday, 14th February 2021. The picture captured the largest volcano in the solar system Olympus Mons emerging in the early morning sunlight. They have been kept close in to the planet so they can get high-resolution pictures of the surface and act as telecommunications relay stations for landed robots in contact with Earth.
The image was taken from an altitude of 24,700 kilometres (15,300 miles) above the Martian surface on Wednesday, a day after the probe entered Mars’ orbit. The mission is designed to reveal the secrets of Martian weather, but the UAE also wants it to serve as an inspiration for the region’s youth.
Hope became the first of three spacecraft to arrive at the Red Planet this month after China and the U.S. also launched missions in July, taking advantage of a period when the Earth and Mars are nearest. Hope plans to carry out some novel research. It’s going to trace how energy moves through the atmosphere from the very bottom to the very top. One of its quests is to study the leakage into space of neutral atoms of hydrogen and oxygen – remnants from Mars’ once abundant water. This will add to our understanding of precisely how a previously warm and wet planet became the cold, dusty, desiccated world it is today.