«Hope» will spend the next seven months moving towards Mars at an average speed of 121,000 km/h.
After a few false starts due to bad weather, the Emirates Mars Mission and its Hope probe has successfully launched from Tanegashima Space Center off the coast of Kyushu, Japan. It will spend the next seven months moving towards Mars at an average speed of 121,000 km/h.
What’s Hope all about, and what will it do when it gets to the red planet?
Hope is an orbital spacecraft that will explore the atmosphere of Mars globally while sampling both diurnal (daily) and seasonal timescales. That’s never been done by any previous Mars mission. It’s scheduled to orbit Mars for at least one entire Martian year—that’s 687 days.
It’s almost completely autonomous spacecraft because it will take radio signals 13 to 26 minutes to travel from Hope at Mars to the ground network on Earth. In addition, the Command and Control Center in the Emirates will only contact Hope for 6-8 hours, twice a week. This is, after all, a super low-cost mission.
Hope is scheduled to reach Mars in February 2021 after traveling 495 million miles.
In about a month from now the control center in Dubai in the UAE will adjust Hope’s trajectory to push it towards Mars.
