The request was both clear-cut and unimaginably complex.
In 2015, representatives from the United Arab Emirates approached the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics with a proposal: The Middle Eastern country wanted to turbo-boost its science and technology sector, inject inspiration and passion into a generation of young Emiratis and make a significant contribution to science.
The United Arab Emirates wanted to go to Mars by 2021 to mark the country’s 50th anniversary, and they wanted the scientists at LASP to help them get there.
In more ways than one, the proposal was unheard of — the international collaboration involving more than 450 people, the compressed timeline and the fact that the project had so much possibility.
“They came to us with essentially a blank page,” said Pete Withnell, Emirates Mars Mission program manager for the Boulder-based team. “They wanted to do meaningful science from orbit around Mars, they wanted to contribute in a significant way to the science community and that’s where the sentence stopped, so we picked up from there.”
That kind of proposal is extremely rare in the aerospace industry, Withnell said. American space missions are typically funded through NASA and involve a tightly regulated, yearlong or longer process that LASP and the Emirati team compressed into a matter of days.
This is Withnell’s sixth space mission, and he understood the significance.
“I knew this is an amazing opportunity and likely a once-in-a lifetime opportunity, and I think that realization was true for many of us,” he said.
Scientists who worked on the project said they understood there was a real possibility that sending a probe to Mars might not actually happen. Challenges along the way — from coordinating between nearly opposite time zones, communication, the time frame and the coronavirus pandemic — raised questions of whether the Hope Probe would ever leave Earth even months before its launch.
But it did, and the Hope Probe of the Emirates Mars Mission is now orbiting Mars, more than 140 million miles away, and collecting never-before-recorded data on the red planet’s atmosphere.
“It has been more challenging but more rewarding than I could have imagined,” said Brett Landin, Hope Probe spacecraft lead at LASP. “I certainly knew this would be a risky endeavor and I knew there was a significant chance we would fail in terms of the spacecraft might not make it to Mars. But the primary objective was not to get a spacecraft to Mars, it was the inspiration of young people across the (Middle East) region.”
Mission origins
Before the Hope Probe traveled roughly 300 million miles to reach Mars, before it was launched from the Tanegashima Space Centre in Japan, before it was painstakingly inspected and tested at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai and shipped across the globe in the middle of a pandemic, the spacecraft came together, piece by piece, in laboratories in Boulder.
The probe weighs approximately 3,000 pounds and is 9 feet tall and 25 feet wide with its solar panels extended. It carries a 6-foot antennae that relays data from three instruments to Earth: an infrared spectrometer, ultraviolet spectrometer and a radiation-tolerant camera that captures high-resolution images.
While LASP has long been involved with space missions, the Emirates Mars Mission is the first time the laboratory has built an entire deep space spacecraft.
“By necessity we were starting with a blank sheet of paper,” Landin said.
So why Mars, and why LASP?
The United Arab Emirates had already sent satellites into low Earth orbit, said Mohsen Al Awadhi, missions systems engineer for the Emirates Mars Mission.
“The next challenge the government wanted to see is if we could do something challenging that no one has tried to do in the region,” he said. “The importance of Mars, what happened to Mars, how did it lose its atmosphere and how to link that to Earth is a question the science community has been asking and trying to find answers to. That was one of the objectives, to do something unique and not something that had been done before.”
The Hope Probe will be the first probe to provide a complete picture of Mars’ atmosphere and its layers, according to the Emirates Mars Mission website.
The similarities between Mars and Earth are intriguing for scientists, said Justin Deighan, instrument scientist for the Emirates Mars ultraviolet spectrometer at LASP.
Deighan has long been fascinated by Mars — when he graduated from the University of Virginia with his PhD, his mom pulled out photos from his childhood with LEGO rocket ships.
“I think even back then it was the sense that Mars is kind of like Earth but it’s really, really different also,” he said. “I think that familiarity and alienness draws a lot of people in science to it, because it gives you something to study that you can kind of wrap your head around but it’s so different from anything we see in Earth science.”
The surface of Mars indicates that at one point, the planet had plenty of water on its surface — there are networks of valleys and regions that look like they used to be lakes or river deltas.
But now it’s a terrible host planet for water. It’s extremely cold and dry, and the atmospheric pressure is so low that even if the temperature was warm enough to melt the ice, liquid water immediately boils. It’s most likely that the only water on Mars is frozen at the poles, is in extremely salty underground lakes or is vapor in the atmosphere.
“That’s really puzzling — how can you have whole rivers and lakes if you can barely have water at all?” Deighan said. “This is a clue that Mars was very different in the past, the atmosphere was much thicker and it’s undergone a lot of planetary evolution. That’s one reason we want to understand how much water has been lost from the atmosphere.”
The instruments on the Hope Probe are designed to study the atmosphere and to see how hydrogen and oxygen, water’s two chemical building blocks, are escaping the planet’s atmosphere.
The infrared spectrometer looks at energy across the planet and how much solar energy is absorbed daily and seasonally. It’s also tracking the distribution of dust, water vapor and ice, as well as the three-dimensional thermal structure of the atmosphere and how that varies.
The exploration imager is a high resolution camera that can take pictures, study the lower atmosphere, measure the depth of ice in the atmosphere and measure ozone.
And the ultraviolet spectrometer, Deighan’s specialty, is measuring carbon monoxide, hydrogen and oxygen in the top layers of the atmosphere.
Ultraviolet light reacts strongly with atoms and molecules, Deighan said, and looking at it can help scientists study the temperature, composition and structure of upper atmospheres, which is the interface between the planet’s atmosphere and space.
“There’s a lot of stuff that goes on up there that controls how the atmospheres of the planets have changed over the history of the solar system,” he said. “We think Mars has lost a lot of atmosphere over the history of the solar system.”
This particular ultraviolet spectrometer is also able to see the more extreme end of the UV spectrum and marks the first time extreme UV on Mars will be recorded. With less sensitive spectrometers, trying to see hydrogen is like being on a mountain peak surrounded by fog and unable to see your surroundings, Deighan said.
“We’re expecting to see things that we haven’t been able to see before,” Deighan said.
While there’s the undeniable awe factor of deep space, Deighan said there are plenty of other reasons to pursue planetary science.
“It comes down to basic curiosity, wanting to know about this universe we’re living in,” he said. “You might say, it’s this thing that’s a quarter billion kilometers away, what does it matter — but there’s a lot we learn about our own world when we do stuff like this.”
Living on Earth can lead to assumptions that this is the way things are and how Earth works is how planets work, Deighan said.
“But you go to other planets and see that this is not how that works at all. Going to other planets and doing this gives us perspective not just on planetary science but on our circumstance in the universe,” he said.
Transferring deep space know-how
If the United Arab Emirates just wanted to go to Mars, it might have been easier to work with a company to purchase a probe rather than with an academic institution to build one.
But the UAE didn’t just want to go to Mars — government leaders wanted the country’s scientists to learn how to do it themselves.
Before Al Awadhi joined the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in 2014, he worked as a licensed aircraft engineer and started working on satellites after joining the center.
In 2015, he and his wife moved to Boulder and he spent the next five years working on the Hope Probe at LASP.
“There was for sure a big learning curve at the beginning,” he said. “In the laboratory every single engineer has a counterpart, mine was Nic Ferrington, and he’s teaching me and telling me what is to be done, and then I’m given ownership of that.”
The primary purpose of the mission was to transfer know-how, Landin said — to equip the Emirati team to run their own missions, from getting highly volatile hydrazine fuel into the spacecraft while suited up without spilling a drop to flying the probe from Earth.
“We worked shoulder to shoulder for six years and it was an extremely collaborative effort,” Landin said. “We got to the point where their team can fly the spacecraft, maybe not just as well as our team can, but they fly it on a daily basis and they understand the subsystems and analysis.”
The vision of the mission, Withnell said, was to create change in the UAE — to invest in the technology sector and to infuse interest into the younger generation for science and engineering.
“I can say consistently, from engineer to engineer who chose to join the program, it was that overarching goal that we found so inspiring and what was so attractive to join,” Withnell said.
Mission challenges included pandemic
The inspiration and motivation fueling the Emirates Mars Mission did not make it immune to challenges, perhaps none so large as the coronavirus pandemic.
Going from a blank page to launching a deep space probe in six years is “unbelievably ambitious,” Landin said. “Going from zero, from an idea, to launching an interplanetary spacecraft in six years is almost unheard of.”
It also took time to build trust and communication between scientists from two different cultures, Landin said, and there were bureaucratic hurdles like working with the U.S. government on technology export regulations and needing licenses to share technical knowledge with the UAE.
“There was a tremendous amount of learning and paperwork with figuring out how we export this highly sensitive technology to a part of the world that we generally don’t give that technology to,” Landin said.
There was the challenge of being 10 or 11 hours apart from the team in Dubai, and figuring out if scientists on different teams had the same base knowledge of engineering. Sometimes, Landin said, it was just different enough that things that one team of engineers assumed were givens were not.
There was also a certain amount of fear involved in undertaking an international, interplanetary mission, and that fear sometimes impacted the program’s day-to-day operations, Withnell said.
“It’s something that ends up on the world stage, and if you make a wrong move, that is also on the world stage,” he said.
And then, with months left before Hope was set to launch, there was coronavirus.
“The pandemic was something we never, ever planned for, to have airports shut down,” Al Awadhi said. “In early 2020 we had the probe in Dubai and it was supposed to be shipped to Japan in May, and around early March we thought, if we keep it here until May it’s not going to get to Japan. Each day we would plan something and we would have to scrub it because there would be new restrictions.”
Approximately 50 people volunteered to travel to Dubai and Japan in the middle of the pandemic to ensure Hope would get off the ground, Withnell said. The teams had to go through the highest levels of government to get approval for travel. Team members had to quarantine for two weeks every time they got off an airplane.
There were times when Withnell wasn’t sure the launch would happen, that it seemed there was no way to complete everything that needed to be completed in time. Finally, when there was a full team of U.S. and Emirati scientists in Japan six weeks before the launch, Withnell started to feel more certain it would happen.
“If those people hadn’t done that we wouldn’t be in orbit around Mars right now,” Withnell said. “This program is a tribute to their drive and determination to see it through.”
The future of Hope
For the next two years, the Hope Probe will orbit Mars and send data back to NASA’s Deep Space Network, which is then transmitted to LASP and the UAE.
After the primary two-year mission, the Emirati team will decide whether to extend the mission another two years, and potentially another two years after that.
“After four years we will have comprehensive science objectives met,” Withnell said. “If they decide to stop operating the spacecraft, international agreements say it will be decommissioned, which renders it inert from an energy perspective.”
But there is an entire world of data to gather and science to be done before that point. LASP will remain deeply involved in turning the raw data into a science product, Withnell said, as well as monitoring “housekeeping data” on how the probe is holding up.
The Emirates Mars Mission is already successful in the sense that there is now a probe orbiting Mars, but also in that the Emirati team is already seeing an increasing interest in science and technology, Al Awadhi said.
“We’ve got parents talking to us about what their children need to study to do this,” he said. “It’s a similar impact that the U.S. had back in the ’60s that we’re having now. Even though we’re not on the best place on the map in terms of the neighbors we have, that doesn’t have to limit us.”
The mission feels a bit like the UAE’s own Apollo, said Ayesha Sharafi, spacecraft propulsion engineer.
“To me it’s less about the technical and more about what this project means to this nation,” she said. “This is the project we were hoping would create the momentum and the inspiration to get the youth involved, and I wanted to be a part of something that’s important to the future of this nation.”
Members of the Boulder and Dubai teams said they came away from the project with a deep respect and appreciation for their international colleagues.
“We joined the project for the importance of it, but I think what really made us keep going despite all of the challenges was team culture and how much we really enjoyed working with CU Boulder,” Sharafi said. “I think it shows what can be done when different teams come together.”
Landin said he credits the Emirati team for not only their boldness in pursuing a Mars mission, but for following through with it.
“If there’s something I want folks to understand, it’s the audacity of the Emiratis to think they could make such a disruptive change and then the fact that they made it happen,” he said.
Withnell said he started the program knowing about some things about the UAE, including that it’s more progressive than its neighbors.
“I didn’t have a real appreciation for the country, the country’s leaders, the people and the culture. They’re warm, they’re generous and they have a good sense of humor. We have developed life-long friendships with our counterparts,” he said. “I came away from the last six years feeling very encouraged that the UAE has a really good vision and strong leaders, and I hope that ends up being a part of the legacy on the U.S. side of the mission.”
