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Beyond Oil: How the UAE's HOPE Mars Mission Is Breaking the Arab World Out of the Crisis of Scarcity

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What Does Going to Space Have to Do With Solving Scarcity on Earth?

The UAE has come a long way from its beginnings in 1971, when a group of impoverished communities from distinct tribes joined forces in the wake of independence from the United Kingdom. Today, much of the UAE is so new it feels like the future, oil wealth and bold infrastructure projects have helped to turn the nation into one of the richest countries in the world per capita.

But these very business sectors proved vulnerable to a series of economic crashes and the Arab Spring. With the decreasing oil reserves, it was understood by the Emirates government that a population of businessmen was not going to be the solution to this problem. The Emiratis needed a new energy sector and they needed a population of scientists to develop it.

However, Emirati undergraduates tend to study engineering or business, fewer than 5% pursue degrees in basic sciences. Therefore, the Emirates government understood that they would need to create a science driver program, an ambitious program that would inspire its youth and its universities to become leaders in the frontiers of science, which in turn would create the science boom that the UAE required to solve its issues of scarcity and oil dependence.

It is at this point that we come to the story of the maestro behind the Mars project Hope, and how she found herself in the position, at the age of 34 years old today, leading not only the first Arab nation's interplanetary venture as Deputy Project Manager but also chair of the UAE Space Agency, Chair of the UAE Council of Scientists and Minister of State for Advanced Sciences.

Her story shares in the remarkability of her country's mission of Hope, and achieving what anyone would have thought was an impossibility.

Sarah Al Amiri describes how as early as the age of twelve she had a passion for learning more about space, however, at the time, not only did the UAE not have a space sector but it also didn't have programs such as planetary science offered in their universities.

So, she entered computer engineering- her second passion. In 2006, the UAE started developing a space sector but Al Amiri only became aware of job opportunities in this sector in 2009. When she applied, it was still in its start-up phase.

She was put on a team that was developing a second satellite; the team of engineers was comprised of individuals in their early and mid-twenties, who had just graduated from their university programs.

As Al Amiri describes it:

"The job I came into was created for me"[a] job that should have been there but didn't exist before"So, I had nobody to learn from"The only thing that they had provided to anyone joining there was a goal that they needed to achieve"it was the responsibility of myself and each of every single person within that team to develop that entire area within the organisation and eventually grow people within the organisation in that area""

Five years later, Nov 21st, 2013 was the day that Al Amiri was invited to join a feasibility study for a Mars planetary exploration project. However, at the time the UAE did not have a space agency and it did not have planetary scientists, and had only recently launched its first satellite. "The UAE, you see, wanted to celebrate its 50th anniversary with a contribution to humanity, and a contribution to science," said Al Amiri. "They needed a spacecraft to be developed to go to Mars, because Mars is of interest to humanity today, to gather data that scientists don't have access to today, and to answer noble questions that have been posed about Mars but we currently don't have the necessary information to start answering."

The Emirati engineering team was able to defy all odds with the support of three American universities, but namely the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Sharaf was told by his superiors to "build it, not buy it", in order to create skills within the UAE itself.

One of the factors that allowed the UAE to cut ten years down to six years was the converting of some of the space center's engineers into planetary scientists by offering apprentice-like training with researchers in the United States, this was often done on top of a full-work schedule and from long distance teleconferencing, as in the case for Al Amiri.

For those of you who might be thinking that this outside support reduces the accomplishment of the Emirati people, the reader should be aware that over 50% of all Mars missions have failed. You can check out the details of the success rate here.

Because the U.A.E. does not yet have its own rocket industry, Hope was launched aboard an H-IIA rocket from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on July 19th, 2020 on schedule, despite the coronavirus outbreak.

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Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).  She has lectured on the topics of Schiller's aesthetics, Shakespeare's tragedies, Roman history, the Florentine Renaissance among other subjects. She is a writer for (more...)
 

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