'Nail-biting moments': UAE mission to asteroids 'tremendous challenge', minister says

The UAE MBR Explorer’s seven-year odyssey, although fraught with many critical moments, will contribute to the enrichment of the country's space sector and its heritage.

That’s according to Sarah Al Amiri, Minister of State for Public Education and Future Technology and Chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency who in an exclusive interview to Khaleej Times explained how the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA) "comes with many nail-biting moments” as it's launched in March 2028.

“As with EMM, the first of these following a successful launch will be spacecraft activation, as the MBR Explorer will launch in ‘passive mode’ and literally have to be switched on once it is in space.”

Its explained then the spacecraft will detumble and once its attitude is stable, it will deploy the solar panels, “which is a key moment as we rely on those panels not only for operating the spacecraft subsystems and science instruments, but also our main propulsion system, which is a Solar Electric Propulsion system (SEP) based on two highly advanced Hall Effect ion thrusters – something like 98 per cent of the journey among the asteroids will be under ion thruster propulsion.”

The Explorer will fly by the Earth, Mars and six asteroids and will have a planned landing on the final asteroid in 2034 which it will explore for seven months.

Al Amiri points out that the mission’s first direction will actually be away from the main belt and towards the sun, “taking it within 0.7 AU of the star to use Venus’ gravity to help us with our velocity”.

The spacecraft is also designed to survive extreme variations in temperature.

“That means we will be in an extremely hot environment, which necessitates a cooling system using the spacecraft attitude, cooling louvres and airflow within the craft. A further two flybys with Earth and Mars will also supplement the velocity provided by our on-board thrusters but will then take us into the extremely cold outer regions between Mars and Jupiter, where the available solar energy is tiny.”

The spacecraft will be making close approaches of asteroids travelling at around 33,000 km/h and then coming within 200 metres of Justicia after a journey ten times as long as that taken by EMM. “The engineering challenges alone are remarkable,” adds Al Amiri.

The lander will be fully developed in the UAE, from conception and design through to manufacturing, creating new commercial opportunities to accelerate the growth of innovation and advanced technology companies in the Emirates.

The minister says, “It’s a tremendous technical challenge, to build a device that will travel for seven years and billions of kilometres attached to the exterior of the MBR Explorer spacecraft and then activate, deploy to make an asteroid landing and send back science data from the asteroid’s surface.”

She adds, “The lander project, together with many other aspects of the mission, will provide significant heritage, allowing Emirati startups to be able to compete for future contracts with the confidence and track record of having taken part in the mission. Overall, EMA will drive future opportunities, including new Emirati startups, international partnerships and inward investment to the UAE space sector.”

Over 50% of mission to be awarded to UAE-based private sector companies

Shedding light on how the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt is a massive scientific project that will result in the establishment of private Emirati companies specialised in space science and technology, she says, “We are assembling what we call a national team to meet a national challenge – and so we have a number of partnerships with companies such as Yahsat and TII, from universities such as NTSSC at UAEU; NYUAD and KU and with private sector companies and startups. In fact, it is a goal of the program that over 50 per cent of the contracted mission will be awarded to UAE-based private sector companies and we have already started work on bringing together Emirati space startups to work on the development of the lander that will be deployed to land on (269) Justicia, the final asteroid to be studied during the mission.”

Engineers are coming together under the UAE Space Academy knowledge transfer scheme, together with existing private sector companies competing for contracts ranging from software development through systems engineering to mission control.

“There are also a growing number of startups working under the Space Economic Zones initiative. Alongside these we have our academic partners, including UAE-based universities and also our Knowledge Transfer Partner as well as the instrument development teams at the Italian Space Agency alongside commercial instrument contractors. The mission will touch – and expand the skillsets of – thousands of engineers, designers, coders, researchers, students and workers across the country. That’s what we mean by a national team,” Al Amiri points out.

Long-standing EMM team members play senior roles in EMA

Al Amiri underlines that the EMA builds on the significant heritage, learning and expertise developed by the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) and has altered the risk appetite. “In fact the long-standing EMM team members play senior roles in EMA. The huge contribution made by EMM is not just in expertise and talent, but in transforming our attitude to risk, in showing us how far beyond ‘impossible’ we can achieve and inspiring our young people, academic institutions, researchers and engineers to look to space for their future careers. The fact we can build a national team to deliver EMA is entirely down to the tremendous progress and learnings we achieved with EMM.”

Remembering that EMM was intended to disrupt the innovation ecosystem, transform the higher education and research communities and inspire young people to look to careers in space systems, Al Amiri says that the country decided to shape a mission that brought in as many partnerships ensuring that the knowledge transfer process would touch as many people as possible in a wide range of institutions.

She adds, “We framed a new type of mission would take us far beyond Mars – the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt. At the time we were preparing for Mars Orbital Insertion (MOI) with the EMM we had started asking ourselves about what would come next. The only certainty at that stage was that EMM would not be a ‘one-off’ but that, with the support of our national leadership, we would be tasked to develop further missions that built not only on the many learnings of EMM but also the confidence we now had in our abilities as a space-faring nation. We were conscious that EMM had provided a significant challenge, at least five times as complex as the earth observation satellites, we had grown to be able to develop – the new mission should therefore follow the same model, a significant iteration in the nature of the challenge – but not merely for its own sake.”

Reiterating the over-riding goal of the EMA, she says the mission has the potential to open new windows into people’s understanding of the formation of the solar system, as well as to investigate the potential of water-rich asteroids as a usable resource.

Al Amiri adds, “EMA will build greater understanding of asteroid characteristics, origins, formation and evolution. Our key science goals are to measure the surface composition, geology and interior density and structure of asteroids across five ‘families’ of main belt asteroid; understand the origins and evolution of water-rich asteroids and assess the resource potential of asteroids and prepare the way for future asteroid resource exploitation."

"Our final destination, Justicia, is particularly fascinating as we believe it doesn’t actually ‘belong’ in the main belt, but migrated from somewhere in the region where the gas giant planets were formed. It’s a unique opportunity to study an asteroid from the far reaches of our solar system without having to journey that distance.”

Responding to a query about her belief in life beyond Earth, the minister says, “Statistically, given the infinity of space, it would have to be possible. To be honest, I’m more interested in the discovery of the building blocks of life – the water and volatile chemicals in our solar system that could have fostered life on Earth. That’s what we’ll be doing with EMA.”

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