Mapping Mars has always been an exercise in patience. The first person to do so, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, in 1877, had to spend hours peering through his telescope, waiting for a clear view through the atmosphere, and then draw a picture of what he saw. He labelled his depictions of the planet’s linear depressions “canali” – or channels – a term that was subsequently mistranslated in English as “canals”, sparking decades of now-debunked speculation that Mars was home to an advanced civilisation that built them.
The most detailed map of Mars we have today, the “Mars Atlas”, was pieced together by researchers from NYU Abu Dhabi from 3,000 pictures taken by the UAE’s Hope probe and took much longer to produce.
The Emirates Mars Mission was in the works for seven years before Hope was finally launched in July 2020. It reached the Red Planet’s orbit nearly seven months later, and since then has provided the global scientific community with a huge amount of data on its surface temperatures and the composition of its dust and atmosphere.
This could provide critical insight into how the planet’s climate changed from one that could support water into one much more hostile to life today. Researchers also believe Hope could be instrumental in searching Mars for methane, a potential sign of life.
On Tuesday, the UAE Space Agency announced that Hope’s mission will be extended until 2028, a recognition of its ongoing impact in the field of planetary research.
Hope has, in many ways, transcended its brief. The spacecraft was meant to send back one terabyte of data; it has sent 10. And in 2023, it provided the first-ever close-up images of Deimos, one Mars’s moons. The resulting data supports the previously contested theory that Deimos was formed by breaking off from Mars itself.
The spacecraft, the first launched to Mars by an Arab or Muslim-majority country, has also inspired many in this part of Earth to engage with science. More than 100,000 students and teachers have participated in the UAE’s “Generation of Space” programme, which encourages young people to explore science and mathematics. The UAE has also seen a 31 per cent increase in university enrolment in Stem programmes. In the past five years, an entire space-related ecosystem has emerged in the Gulf’s private sector, with new satellite companies being registered in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and the construction of a commercial spaceport in Oman. The result is very likely to be a monumental shift in the Arab world’s level of scientific talent, particularly in the booming field of space exploration.
At the closest point to us in its orbit around the Sun, Mars is more than 50 million kilometres away from Earth. Soon, thanks to Hope, a generation of young people in the Middle East will be able to explore what lies beyond.
