The UAE probe arrives at Mars on Tuesday, Feb 9. Its purpose is to both study the weather on Mars as well as inspire the next generation of that country's scientists and engineers.

Transcript

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Three spacecraft are about to arrive at Mars - one from NASA and two newcomers to the interplanetary space game, China and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE probe arrives tomorrow. Its scientific mission is to study the Martian atmosphere and weather. But another goal is to inspire the next generation of Emirati scientists and engineers. NPR's Joe Palca has a report.

JOE PALCA, BYLINE: Let's say you've been working on a space mission for years. And finally, finally, it's about to arrive at its destination. How do you imagine you'd feel?

OMRAN SHARAF: Excited, proud, but also, like, stressed and worried.

PALCA: Omran Sharaf is the Emirates Mars Mission project director.

SHARAF: Confident - it's a mix of feelings.

PALCA: Confident because so far, everything is going extremely well with the mission. The probe left Earth last July. And with a few mid-course tweaks, the 1.5-ton probe called Hope is spot on target to enter orbit around Mars. But deep space missions, especially the ones headed for Mars, can go from fine to failure in less time than it takes you to say, Houston, we've got a problem. Sarah Al Amiri is head of the UAE space agency. She says it is ever thus.

SARAH BINT YOUSIF AL AMIRI: Everything rests on a single moment. So is launch successful? OK, you're up in the air. Is the first stage separating? OK, it's separated. Is second stage separating? So you go on an emotional rollercoaster during a short amount of time.

PALCA: The next ride on the roller coaster comes at 10:30 Eastern time Tuesday morning. Hope's engines are to fire for 27 minutes so the spacecraft can be captured by Mars' gravity and go into orbit. If they don't, Hope just zooms on by. Now, there have been plenty of orbital missions to Mars, and most of them go into an orbit that's just a couple hundred miles above the surface.

BETHANY EHLMANN: The Emirates Mars Mission has this super clever orbit where they're actually further out.

PALCA: Bethany Ehlmann is a professor of planetary science at Caltech and president of the Planetary Society. Ehlmann says Hope's orbit will allow it to study Martian weather in a new way, since it can watch a large swath of the planet for hours at a time.

EHLMANN: No satellite in Mars' orbit that does this - we don't have a weather satellite. So we don't really actually quite understand what the Martian weather is like, like, how things vary over the course of a day.

PALCA: Ehlmann says the Hope probe also has instruments that can look at the big picture of what's going on in the planet's atmosphere.

EHLMANN: But they're going to get atmospheric data that we've never seen before.

PALCA: But as much as the mission is designed to improve the scientific understanding of Mars, there's another purpose - to demonstrate the UAE's ability to carry out a technically complex mission and get younger Emiratis excited about math, science and engineering. Advanced Technology Minister Sarah Al Amiri says children are getting the message.

AL AMIRI: And that goes down to my 4-year-old who knows where Mars is. And I never recall in my lifetime seeing children going out, looking up at the sky and saying that's Mars, and we have a mission arriving there.

PALCA: Of course, that just adds to the stress while waiting to see if Hope's engines fire on time to put the probe into orbit. The last thing you want to do is disappoint a four-year-old.

Joe Palca, NPR News.

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