The Emirates Mars Mission

Abstract

The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) was launched to Mars in the summer of 2020, and is the first interplanetary spacecraft mission undertaken by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The mission has multiple programmatic and scientific objectives, including the return of scientifically useful information about Mars. Three science instruments on the mission’s Hope Probe will make global remote sensing measurements of the Martian atmosphere from a large low-inclination orbit that will advance our understanding of atmospheric variability on daily and seasonal timescales, as well as vertical atmospheric transport and escape. The mission was conceived and developed rapidly starting in 2014, and had aggressive schedule and cost constraints that drove the design and implementation of a new spacecraft bus. A team of Emirati and American engineers worked across two continents to complete a fully functional and tested spacecraft and bring it to the launchpad in the middle of a global pandemic. EMM is being operated from the UAE and the United States (U.S.), and will make its data freely available.

First Synoptic Images of FUV Discrete Aurora and Discovery of Sinuous Aurora at Mars by EMM EMUS

“…Photon counts in each pixel are recorded in 7-s integrations. Hope orbits every ∼55 hr in a 20,000 × 43,000 km (6.9 × 13.7 Mars radii) science orbit inclined at 25°, providing near-complete geographic and diurnal coverage of Mars every ∼10 days (Amiri et al, 2022). Holsclaw et al (2021) describes in detail the EMUS instrument and its science goals and data collection modes.…”

EMIRS Observations of the Aphelion‐Season Mars Atmosphere

“…The Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer (EMIRS; Edwards et al., 2021) is an instrument with direct heritage to the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES; Christensen et al., 2001). Beyond the value of extending the existing, multi‐decadal record of continuous spacecraft observations of the Mars atmosphere, the EMIRS instrument takes advantage of the unique, high‐altitude orbit of the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM; Amiri et al., 2022; Almatroushi et al., 2021), which enables sampling of all local times over a wide range of latitudes and longitudes over a short sub‐seasonal timescale of less than 2 weeks. This ability of EMIRS is explored for water ice clouds by Atwood et al.…”

Combined Analysis of Hydrogen and Oxygen 102.6 nm Emission at Mars

“…The Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) is a far‐ultraviolet spectrograph designed for remote sensing of the upper atmosphere and corona (Holsclaw et al., 2021) as a part of the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) (Almatroushi et al., 2021; Amiri et al., 2022). A key design requirement of this instrument was sensitivity to H Lyman beta in order to improve understanding of the optically thick H corona.…”