Science & Technology

Launch of UAE’s Mars mission postponed due to bad weather

Dubai, Jul 14 (efe-epa).- The launch of the United Arab Emirates to Mars, initially scheduled later in the day, has been postponed due to bad weather, UAE space agency announced on Tuesday.

“The UAE Space Agency and the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, in collaboration with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, have announced a delay of the Emirates Mars Mission’s Hope Probe launch due to the weather conditions,” it tweeted.

The mission, which was set to be launched on 15 July at 5.51 Japan time (14 July at 20.51 pm GMT time), is due to take off on July 16 8:43pm GMT.

The launch will take place at Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center.

 The mission will seek out knowledge needed for challenges such as water and food in the region as the temperature rises, threatening a country that already has scarce water resources.

Mars has perplexed scientists who want to understand its transformation from a planet that had a wet atmosphere to a dry and arid one, as we see today.

The mission will be studying water vapor, ice clouds, ozone and dust on the red planet employing two infrared spectrometers, an imager and the Emirates explorer imager EXI to take color images of Mars.

Using both instruments together, they will map all the different wave lengths that have been observed.

“Better understanding the historical changes that Mars went through allows us to understand how planetary systems that are sort of similar to Earth evolved with time and what change happened and what influences changes on those planetary systems. To understand what could possibly happen to earth,” Sarah al-Amiri, Minister of State for Advanced Sciences said.

The spacecraft was assembled in the University of Colorado Boulder because some of the facilities were already based there.

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