Dubai, United Arab Emirates – The United Arab Emirates announced, on Tuesday, its plans to explore the planet Venus and land on an asteroid before the end of the next decade, in reference to its most famous new ambitions. After its first mission to Mars.
The spacecraft will take seven years to build for the mission, with a launch date set for 2028. It will orbit Venus and then Earth, using gravity-assisted maneuvers to reach the asteroid belt by 2030. The vehicle will then monitor seven large asteroids. In the belt, before landing on an asteroid 560 million kilometers (347 million miles) from Earth in 2033.
Venus missions have been around since the 1960s, with the Soviet Union, the United States, the European Space Agency, and Japan already successfully orbiting a second planet far from the Sun.
The mission, which will be developed with the University of Colorado’s Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory, at Boulder, is scheduled to begin on a journey of 3.6 billion kilometers (2.2 billion miles), seven times longer than that journey. The Emirati Hope Probe, which reached Mars in February 2021. This landing made the UAE the second country to successfully enter Mars orbit on its first attempt. The first was India.
The Hope Probe, a $200 million project called “Al Amal” in Arabic, was launched on July 20, 2020 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The Emirates project has been in the pipeline for six years, and the young sheikh in the Gulf made it the fifth country in the world to reach Mars, and the first Arab country to do so.
The UAE Mars Mission teamed up with a team from the University of Colorado to build the Hope spacecraft. But the oil-rich Gulf state itself has invested years in space research and development, establishing its own space agency in 2014 after launching satellites in 2009 and 2013 developed with South Korean partners.
While it wouldn’t be the first country to take a mission to Venus and land on an asteroid, the UAE is known for its big hunt. It is already home to the world’s tallest building, deepest diving pool, largest shopping mall, and a seemingly endless list of larger-than-life goals designed to boost its international image and foster scientific and technological innovation in a country of 10 million people.
“We have our eyes on the stars, because our journey towards development and progress knows no boundaries, no limits, no limits… With every new progress we make in space, we create opportunities for young people here on Earth,” said the UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid The plan is on Tuesday.
