An asteroid that will host life’s constructing blocks will get a visit from a United Arab Emirates (UAE) spacecraft a couple of decade from now, if all goes in accordance with plan.
In October 2021, the UAE announced that it plans to launch an ambitious mission to the asteroid belt in 2028. That mission will visit seven different space rocks, and even land on one among them, an asteroid called (269) Justitia.
On Sunday (May 28), the nation gave us some recent details about this daring asteroid mission — including its name, the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA).
“We’ll never stop to look ahead; we’ll never stop our efforts to develop a brighter future for our young generations,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoumbin Rashid Al Maktoum, the vp and prime minister of the UAE and the ruler of Dubai, said in a press release.
The EMA spacecraft might be named after the sheikh, we learned Sunday: It can be called the MBR Explorer.
Related: UAE’s ambitious asteroid mission will tour 7 space rocks
The MBR Explorer will visit its first asteroid in 2030, and can follow an orbital path allowing it to choose up speed from several planets along the best way. (It is common for spacecraft to get such “gravity assists” from worlds like Venus or Mars to save lots of on fuel, and to do side observations to check their instruments.)
After passing by six asteroids, the mission goals to the touch down upon Justitia in 2034 with a small lander that may deploy from MBR Explorer. Justitia could have organic molecules on its surface; organics are the constructing blocks of the complex molecules that would form life in the appropriate circumstances.
More generally, scientists seek water and organics everywhere in the solar system to raised understand how life arose on Earth. That search could also be especially meaningful on Justitia, which could have formed closer to our planet after which migrated out to its current position within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, scientists say.
The remainder of the mission manifest includes flybys of the asteroids (10254) Westerwald, (623) Chimaera, (13294) Rockox; (88055) 2000 VA28, (23871) 1998 RC76 and (59980) 1999 SG6, all meant to represent “different classes of asteroid with varied compositional types,” UAE Space Agency officials said in the identical statement. Justitia and Chimaera are around 31 miles (50 kilometers) in diameter, with the remaining asteroids lower than 6 miles (10 km) across each.
4 science instruments have been announced to probe the geology, composition and structure of the asteroids: a high-resolution camera, a thermal infrared camera, a mid-wavelength spectrometer and an infrared spectrometer.
The UAE Space Agency was formed in 2014 and is one among the youngest space agencies on the planet; by comparison, NASA was formed in 1958 from previous U.S. government groups. The UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter, which launched in 2020, was the primary Arab spacecraft to achieve the Red Planet, making it on the primary try, no less.
The primary UAE astronaut, Hazzaa al Mansoori, launched on a brief mission to the International Space Station in 2019. There may be one other UAE astronaut in orbit straight away: Sultan Al Neyadi, who launched to the orbiting lab in March on SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission.