{"id":42889,"date":"2020-06-09T09:25:20","date_gmt":"2020-06-09T09:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=42889"},"modified":"2020-06-09T09:25:20","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T09:25:20","slug":"libyas-noc-says-armed-force-entered-el-sharara-oilfield-told-employees-to-stop-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=42889","title":{"rendered":"Libya\u2019s NOC says \u2018armed force\u2019 entered El Sharara oilfield, told employees to stop work"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nLONDON: In just 40 days, the UAE will become the first Arab country to send a mission to Mars, part of a wider regional effort to build knowledge and create opportunities, particularly for young\u00a0people.
\u201cThis mission is not just about the UAE it\u2019s about the region, it\u2019s about the Arab issue,\u201d Omran Sharaf, the mission\u2019s project manager at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC), said.
\u201cThe region is going through tough times and we do need good news and we need the youth in the region to really start looking inwards, building their own nations and putting differences aside to co-exist with people with different faiths and backgrounds and work together.\u201d
The Hope Mars Mission will start its journey on July 14 and is expected to reach the planet by February, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the UAE.\u00a0
The project has been planned, managed and implemented by an Emirati team overseen and funded by the UAE Space Agency.\u00a0
The MBRSC has developed the probe in cooperation with international partners, including the Universities of Colorado, Berkeley and Arizona.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe UAE’s mission to Mars, the Hope Probe. (Courtesy of UAE Space Agency)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\nSpeaking at a webinar on the mission on Monday, Sarah Al-Amiri, the UAE\u2019s Minister of State for Advanced Sciences, outlined why the project was so important to the Emirates.
\u201cToday the UAE is an economy based on services, logistics, and oil and gas, and within the region it is considered a diversified economy, but if we project that down the line, the importance of knowledge-intensive sectors becomes more and more prominent for the country, as well as creating new knowledge-intensive organizations,\u201d she said.
Developing talent, creating opportunities for engineers, scientists, and researchers working in natural sciences are the next important endeavours for the country, the minister added.
\u201cMars provided us with the necessary challenge to rigorously develop talent in engineering, it gave us an appetite for risk and being able to circumvent the risk and push forward with the mission for development. It allows us to start integrating and creating new opportunities for scientists within the UAE and those that are studying the natural sciences,\u201d Al-Amiri said.
Since the project was launched in 2014, the team has designed, developed and assembled the spacecraft, and repeatedly tested it through the harsh conditions it is expected to encounter.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe Hope probe will study the Martian atmosphere to understand how it developed into its current state.\u00a0(Courtesy of UAE Space Agency)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\nAs the UAE does not have a launch pad, the spacecraft was shipped to Japan in April. It was moved three weeks ahead of schedule, due to the increasing travel restrictions being imposed to combat the spread of COVID-19.
\u201cNothing about this mission has been easy, since day one the timeframe has been challenging, the budget itself has been a bit challenging, there were very strict requirements when we came to the budget and it was limited and then the COVID-19 situation came into place on top of all the other challenges,\u201d Sharaf said.
He added that the details of the budget would be announced at a later stage.
\u201cWhen it comes to these projects, the public understands the importance for the UAE,\u201d Sharaf said. \u201cIt\u2019s about addressing our national challenges and building capabilities. We live in a region with geographical challenges, when it comes to water, food and clean energy and everybody is quite excited about this mission because they understand the value it brings.\u201d
Al-Amiri said the data from the mission would be publicly available from two months after the spacecraft starts to orbit Mars between August and September next year.
Any scientist would be able to use the information and analyze the figures, she said.
\u201cWe are looking at and studying a planet that has indications that it was very similar to our own planet and that has undergone some form of change and has gone into a point where it can\u2019t have one of the major building blocks of life, as we humans know it and as we have defined it.\u00a0
\u201cUnderstanding the reasons for the loss of hydrogen and oxygen, the building blocks of water from the atmosphere of Mars and understanding what role does mars itself play.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe Hope probe will start its journey on July 14, 2020, and is scheduled to arrive to Mars by Feb. 2021, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the union of the UAE.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\nThe team would also be studying the weather on Mars throughout an entire year.
\u201cWe are the very first weather satellites of Mars,\u201d Al-Amiri said. \u201cPrior to this we have been studying the weather on that planet and understanding better the climate of Mars by sporadically sampling various areas around the planet but not understanding the changes that happened throughout an entire day.\u201d
However, Sharaf said \u201cthe UAE has always had plans for the future and we are definitely not going to stop with Mars.\u00a0
The UAE space program is more of a mean or a tool to build our knowledge economy, so reaching Mars is not the objective and whatever the next phase is will be focused more on transferring that knowledge to the different sectors that we have in the UAE.\u201d
Over the last 60 years, only six countries have sent missions to the Red Planet.
\u201cSpace travel has by and large been in the group of a small select number of superpowers, so this is a great opportunity for the UAE to go beyond that and to go into something different,\u201d Alistair Burt, Chairman of the Emirates Society, which hosted the webinar from London, said.
The Emirates has already launched two satellites and sent an astronaut to the International Space Station and it has vowed to build a human settlement on Mars by 2117.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe UAE Astronaut Programme sent the first Emirati and Arab astronaut to join astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) in Spetember 2019. (Courtesy of MBRSC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n\u201cFifty percent of the missions that go to Mars have failed and this is one of the reasons the UAE chose Mars as a target because of the challenges around it and it\u2019s a message that the challenges that we are facing in the region are not easier,\u201d Sharaf said. \u201cThe best way to increase the likelihood of succeeding is by testing, testing and again testing, debugging and then fixing, and that\u2019s why the philosophy of the mission is to continue testing till the day that we are going to launch and we won\u2019t stop this.\u201d
Sir Ian Blatchford, director of the UK\u2019s Science Museum Group, described the UAE\u2019s project as fascinating.
\u201cWhat they are trying to achieve is remarkable for a country that is developing this infrastructure, but particularly I think they\u2019re being very modest in describing the fact that they\u2019re doing it in half the time,\u201d he said.
Three other missions are heading for Mars over the next year, including NASA\u2019s Mars Perseverance Rover, China\u2019s Tianwen-1, which will launch next month, and ExoMars, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LONDON: In just 40 days, the UAE will become the first Arab country to send a mission to Mars, part of a wider regional effort to build knowledge and create opportunities, particularly for young\u00a0people.\u201cThis mission is not just about the UAE it\u2019s about the region, it\u2019s about the Arab issue,\u201d Omran Sharaf, the mission\u2019s project…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}