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July 20, 2020 The first Arab space mission to Mars started aboard a rocket from Japan, after a first delay due to bad weather. From the Tanegashima space center in Southern Japan at 11.58 pm the rocket carrying the United Arab Emirates' el-Amal probe ("hope") took off.The al-Amal mission, which will last for two years, for an estimated total cost of 200 million dollars was wanted directly by the government of Dubai, in 2014, when the UAE still did not even have a space agency, with the target to bring the probe into orbit around Mars by December 2, 2021, the date on which the Arab country will celebrate its first 50 years of existence.
Once arrived, al-Amal will enter a strongly elliptical orbit, very different from the trajectories of all the other missions that have alternated around the red planet. The main scientific objective of the mission is to study the dynamics of the Martian atmosphere both in its diurnal variations and in the passing of the seasons. The Emirate government has announced that the data collected by the probe will be made known immediately and will be open and available to the entire international scientific community.
The launch of the Emirati spacecraft will be the first of the three towards Mars scheduled for this summer, when the Red Planet is in a particularly favorable position with respect to Earth. The Chinese Tianwen-1 mission, with an orbiter, a lander and a rover, and the American Mars 2020, with the Perseverance rover, will follow it, within the launch window open until mid-August. The European-Russian ExoMars mission has been postponed to 2022