Aware that their economy should no longer be based solely on oil revenues, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have begun to look to the stars, or rather Mars. By setting itself the disproportionate goal of settling a habitable colony there by 2117, the country not only wants to play in the big leagues but especially hopes to develop advanced technologies that could be exploited on Earth. Do they have the resources for their ambition?
Displaying an outlandish ambition
With its Mars 2117 program, the United Arab Emirates wants to be the leading regional space power, as well as the first country to colonize Mars. By then, the first big step will be the launch into orbit of the Hope probe – designed for the occasion – scheduled for early 2021. Why that particular year? Because in 2021 there is a real… alignment of the planets. The country will be celebrating its 50th anniversary and the distance between the blue and red planets will be the shortest (it will be two years before this phenomenon recurs). So the UAE plans to send its spacecraft in July 2020 to be put into orbit some 200 days later. The goals of the mission are mapping the atmosphere, understanding the climate dynamics, determining how surface weather layers modify the upper layers and studying why Mars loses its oxygen and hydrogen.
Pragmatism to make some people pale
Newly created in 2014, the United Arab Emirates space agency has already raised $5.2 billion. As to where this money is going, there is no shortage of ideas! Close to $136 million is earmarked for construction of the Mars Science City, a Martian city in the desert covering 177,000 m2, consisting of several domes that house laboratories in which scientists will work for a year to find solutions to creating food and energy, and managing water resources on the red planet. For equipment, design is underway for the Hope Mars probe, which, no bigger than a car, will contain the equipment to analyze the atmosphere (imager, infrared spectrometer and ultraviolet spectrometer), to provide autonomy for the machine (batteries, three 60-watt solar panels), to give a certain intelligence (software that will allow the probe to make its own decisions to correct its trajectory, for example), if it cannot be guided directly from the Earth due to the 13 to 20 minutes that it will take for any signal to traverse the distance between the two planets.
In 2016, there were approximately forty probes, landers or orbiters that had been sent to Mars since the early 1960s. So, will Hope be just the 41st spacecraft orbiting the red planet, or will it announce the beginning of a new era in the conquest of space with the arrival of a major player to compete with the United States, Europe and the Russians, and for which the technological effects of its missions could reflect in the medium and long term on the Western economies?