Arab world's first asteroid hopper will visit seven space rocks
UAE's MBR Explorer aims to solve mystery of ultra-red celestial body in the asteroid belt beyond Mars
The MBR Explorer (artist’s impression) is set to launch in 2028.Credit: United Arab Emirates Space Agency
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Space Agency has confirmed details of its plan to embark on a five-billion-kilometre, seven-year journey to the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter.
The agency’s MBR Explorer spacecraft is intended to launch on 3 March 2028 and will orbit seven asteroids, before attempting to land on its final destination, the asteroid Justitia, in May 2035. The lander will be designed and manufactured by companies including start-ups based in the UAE, according to an announcement on 28 May. The agency says it has not yet decided on a partner organization for its launch, but is expected to make an announcement later this year.
If successful, the mission will be the Middle East’s first and the world’s fifth to land a spacecraft on an asteroid. “Landing has only been done by a handful of other missions and on a handful of other asteroids,” says Kevin Walsh, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
“It’s challenging and expensive and time-consuming. So, to have another space agency that is attempting such an ambitious effort is really exciting,” he adds.
All in the family
The UAE Space Agency, which first announced its intentions to visit the asteroid belt in October 2021, plans to study the origin and evolution of water-rich asteroids. The seven targets belong to five known asteroid families. Surveying them will provide valuable information about the origin of water on Earth and on other planets in the Solar System, says Hoor AlMazmi, science lead for the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA).
“We suspect that below the surface of the asteroid, there’s a fair bit of water or ice, particularly objects that are in the very distant part of the asteroid belt, where they’re far enough from the Sun,” says John Kavelaars, a planetary astronomer at the National Research Council of Canada in Victoria.
The MBR Explorer will make fly-bys as close as 150 kilometres to the seven asteroids, travelling at up to 33,000 kilometres per hour. Weighing more than two tonnes at take-off, the explorer will use two solar-powered ion thrusters for the longest part of its journey.
Equipped with two cameras and two spectrometers, the spacecraft will capture high-resolution images and collect data on the asteroids’ temperatures and geological characteristics. These include the size and roughness of grains, as well as the minerals and organic matter contained on the asteroids' surface.
The asteroid Justitia (computer-generated image) will be the MBR Explorer mission's final destination.Credit: United Arab Emirates Space Agency
Red mystery
After orbiting the 54-kilometre-diameter Justitia for seven months starting in October 2034, the MBR Explorer will deploy a lander to touch down on the asteroid’s surface in May 2035.
“For seven months, we’ll be doing really intensive studies of Justitia, nailing down our landing zones and doing a couple of rehearsals in the orbit before deploying the lander,” says Mohammed Alameri, a mechanical engineer on EMA’s spacecraft team.
The scientists hope to understand more about Justitia’s origins. The asteroid's intense redness comes from complex organic material on its surface, says AlMazmi. “That indicates the existence of ice below its surface.” However, such red objects are normally found only in more distant asteroid populations, such as those in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune and the Neptune trojans, celestial bodies orbiting the Sun in a spot near Neptune.
“There’s an expectation that this object was probably formed in the very distant Solar System, and came inward,” says Kavelaars, who was part of a team that discovered several moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
“To be able to compare it head-to-head with the Trojan asteroids and Kuiper belt objects is really exciting,” says Walsh.
The EMA team says a key task in the spacecraft design is developing a navigation system, so it does not need to rely on instructions from mission control in Abu Dhabi. “The further the explorer is from Earth, the longer the signal delay, which will be more than an hour when the spacecraft approaches Justitia,“ says Alameri. It needs to be “autonomous enough to know exactly when to take the pictures, when to slow and point [the camera] and gather all of the science data”, he adds.
The MBR Explorer will also orbit Venus, Earth and Mars. During its Mars manoeuvres, it will have a chance to greet its older sibling, the Hope probe, which will be in a parking orbit around the red planet at the time. The probe is currently orbiting Mars and this year captured the first images of the far side of its moonlet, Deimos.
Until now, only four space missions have successfully landed on asteroids. Japanese missions landed on Itokawa in 2005 and on Ryugu in 2018; and NASA crafts landed on Bennu in 2020 and on Eros in 2001.
“These were relatively small objects. To land and operate on something that’s 50 kilometres across, it’s going to be a completely different operation,” says Walsh. Landing on asteroids “is hard because there’s no gravity to hold you down on the surface”, he adds.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01806-3
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Miryam Naddaf
