How will UAE’s MBR Explorer travel 5 billion km?

How will UAE’s MBR Explorer travel 5 billion km?

The UAE’s MBR Explorer that’s set to travel 5 billion km into deep space will be created in an ambitious 13-year project involving six years of development and seven years of exploration before its launch in the first quarter of 2028.

The spacecraft will travel past Venus using the planet's gravity to alter its velocity shielding from the sun's intense heat and solar wind. The spacecraft is designed to survive extreme variations in temperature. A series of manoeuvers around not only Venus, but Earth and Mars will help keep the spacecraft on its course with each asteroid encounter creating vast new set of data.

Mohammed Al Ameri, technical team of the mission says, “The spacecraft itself has several challenges. We are travelling much further than the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM). The thermal environment and the dynamics are totally different."

"We're going through Venus' flyby and it will be very close to the Sun. This means the temperature will be very high compared to what we had in EMM. Also, we are going to beyond Mars this time which means we will then fly far away from the Sun and then the temperature will be very low.”

Eight times more efficient propulsion system

Engineers clarify that