Emirates Mars Mission marks busy first year

  • Date: 19-Jul-2021
  • Source: Times of Oman
  • Sector:Defense
  • Country:UAE
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Emirates Mars Mission marks busy first year

The mission has not only performed nominally across all areas, but has exceeded its anticipated performance, encompassing a range of additional activities and freeing up valuable resources to perform additional observations. "We've had quite a lot of 'wiggle room' in addition to our planned parameters and our confidence in our spacecraft has gone from strength to strength, to be honest. We were able to cut the number of trajectory correction manoeuvres, perform additional observations during our flight to Mars and now have added a whole area of scientific study to the mission that I can only describe as a 'bonus'. It has been a very busy year indeed for Hope!" said EMM project director Omran Sharaf. The launch from Tanegashima commenced a 493, 000, 000 Km journey to reach and orbit the Red Planet, with an original seven Trajectory Correction Manoeuvres (TCMs) cut to four because of the spacecraft's outstanding performance during the Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOPs). This conserved resources and allowed the EMM team to perform a series of observations en-route to Mars. EMM's Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) instrument was activated during Hope's cruise to Mars and used to image Mars' exospheric hydrogen. The instrument was