Building off the success of its Hope spacecraft, which is
still circling and studying Mars, the UAE announced plans for an ambitious
follow-up mission: a grand tour of the asteroid belt.
اضافة اعلان
“The asteroid belt mission was the right amount of
challenge,” said Sarah Al-Amiri, chair of the UAE Space Agency. “Interesting
science relevant to the science community, good opportunities for
collaboration.”
The spacecraft, named MBR Explorer after Sheikh Mohammed bin
Rashid Al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the UAE, is
scheduled to launch in 2028. In February 2030, the spacecraft will arrive at
Westerwald, a 2.2km- wide asteroid, zipping past at 20,000mph on its way to
visit six more objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
“We would get a more detailed look at the surface of the
asteroid,” said Hoor Al-Mazmi, the science lead for the mission. “And we would
understand the interior density and the structure of the asteroid.”
The seventh asteroid, Justitia, is the most intriguing.
About 48km wide, Justitia is very reddish, an unusual color for an asteroid.
Indeed, it looks more like one of the small icy worlds found in the Kuiper
belt, circling the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune.
That has led planetary scientists to speculate that Justitia
formed in the outer reaches of the solar system and then was scattered inward
by the shifting orbits of the giant planets, eventually joining the asteroid
belt.
If that is true, a visit to Justitia would provide a
close-up study of a Kuiper belt object without the long trip to the solar
system’s distant reaches.
The MBR Explorer is scheduled to sidle up within a few
hundred feet of Justitia in October 2034 and spend at least seven months
studying it with cameras and spectrometers that will be able to identify the
asteroid’s composition, including the presence of water. The reddish color is
believed to point to carbon-based molecules that are the building blocks for
life. The spacecraft will also drop off a small lander to set down on
Justitia’s surface.
With a mass of more than 2 tonnes, the MBR Explorer will be
bigger than the UAE’s Hope spacecraft, which went to Mars. For flybys of the
first six asteroids, the spacecraft will be traveling quickly, requiring
precise navigation to ensure the instruments are pointed at the asteroid.
“The complexity adds up,” said Mohsen Al-Awadhi, the program
director of the mission.
And the spacecraft has to launch within a three-week period
in March 2028 to be able to make all the planned flybys. If it cannot get off
the ground then, the entire mission has to be replanned, probably with new
asteroid destinations.
To date, NASA, the European Space Agency, China and JAXA,
the Japanese space agency, have sent robotic spacecraft to asteroids.
The UAE, an oil-rich country that is a bit smaller in size
than the state of Maine, is a newcomer to spaceflight. Two decades ago, it did
not have a space program.
Today it is increasingly active in space, part of a push to
jump-start a high-tech industry in the country in preparation for a future when
petroleum no longer flows as plentifully. That includes sending astronauts to
the International Space Station, with one, Sultan Al-Neyadi, currently in
orbit.
In 2009 the UAE’s first satellite, DubaiSat-1, reached orbit.
It was built in South Korea, but Emirati engineers essentially worked as
apprentices at the satellite manufacturer. Nine years later, the Mohammed bin
Rashid Space Center in Dubai built KhalifaSat, an Earth-observing satellite,
without foreign help.
For the Mars mission, its first foray farther into the solar
system, the UAE again recruited foreign help, from the Laboratory for
Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Hope launched in July 2020 and arrived in orbit around Mars
seven months later. It continues to study how weather events like dust storms
in the lower atmosphere affect the rate at which the thin atmosphere of Mars
escapes into space. Recently it captured high-resolution images of Deimos, the
smaller of the two Martian moons.
Emirati space officials discussed ideas of where to head
next. “We actually looked at the whole solar system in terms of what happens
next after the Emirates Mars mission,” Amiri said.
Pete Withnell, who served as project manager for the UAE’s
Mars mission, said the Colorado laboratory would have “an even more intense
involvement” in the new asteroid mission.
Some Emiratis who started as aerospace novices building the
Hope spacecraft are now among the leaders of the asteroid mission. That
includes Awadhi, a former maintenance engineer for the UAE airline who served
as the lead systems engineer on the Mars mission.
Withnell said that the new spacecraft might be assembled in
Colorado again and that other organizations were also involved. The Italian
Space Agency is providing one of the spectrometer instruments, and Malin Space
Science Systems of San Diego is building the two cameras.
But much more will be manufactured in the UAE this time.
Fifty percent of the money spent on the mission must be spent within the
country.
“This is a requirement we did not have” for the Mars
mission, al-Awadhi said, adding, “That’s a big difference.”
“We are looking at developing our local industry,” Amiri
said.
The variety of asteroids that MBR Explorer visits will offer
useful scientific comparisons for similar asteroids that will be visited on
other missions, such as Lucy, a NASA mission that launched in 2021.
“I think it’s a good mission,” Hal Levison, the principal
investigator for Lucy, said of the Emirati mission. “It’ll add something unique
that NASA is not planning to do.”
Planetary scientists might be able to figure out whether
Justitia really is an interloper from the outer solar system. But other bodies
thought to be Kuiper belt objects that have been pushed inward are more
grayish-reddish. “The interpretation of that is that the exposure of the sun is
burning off some of the red stuff as you get closer,” he said.
Thus, Justitia, which is as red as a distant Kuiper belt
object, seems too red for where it is.
“It supplies us with a mystery,” Levison said.
Read more Odd and Bizarre
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
