Hope

On the evening of 9 February 2021, the Burj Khalifa glowed red and a control room in Dubai went quiet. Eleven light-minutes away, the Hope probe, Al-Amal in Arabic, was on its own. To be captured by Mars it had to fire its six Delta-V thrusters for 27 unbroken minutes, burning nearly half its fuel to slash its speed from 121,000 to 18,000 kilometers per hour. Roughly half of all missions ever sent to Mars had failed. The United Arab Emirates, whose space agency was only seven years old, had bet its golden jubilee on this one burn.

The mission existed because the country's leadership set an audacious deadline: reach Mars before the fiftieth anniversary of the UAE's founding in December 2021. Emirati engineers at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre built Hope in six years, in deep partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University and UC Berkeley, for about 200 million dollars. The 1,350-kilogram orbiter left Earth on 20 July 2020 aboard a Japanese H-IIA rocket from Tanegashima.

When the burn ended and the signal confirmed capture, the UAE became only the fifth entity to reach Mars, after the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe and India, and the first Arab nation in interplanetary space. Hope then settled into an orbit unlike any other: a vast 55-hour ellipse ranging tens of thousands of kilometers high, designed to watch weather across the entire planet at every time of day, effectively Mars' first true weather satellite.

The science followed quickly. Hope's ultraviolet spectrometer captured Mars' elusive discrete auroras in unprecedented detail, and the mission released its atmospheric data free to scientists worldwide. Two days later China's Tianwen-1 arrived, and a week after that NASA's Perseverance landed. February 2021 became the most crowded month in the history of Mars exploration, and a 50-year-old desert nation had gotten there first.