The United Arab Emirates is on its way to the asteroid belt

Building on the success of its Hope spacecraft, which continues to orbit and study Mars, the United Arab Emirates on Monday announced plans for an ambitious follow-up mission: a grand tour of the asteroid belt.

“The asteroid belt mission was the right amount of challenge,” said Sarah al-Amiri, president of the United Arab Emirates Space Agency. “Interesting science relevant to the scientific community, good opportunities for collaboration.”

The spacecraft, named MBR Explorer, named after Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, is scheduled for launch in 2028. In February 2030, the spacecraft will arrive at Westerwald, a 1.4 mile-long-wide asteroid, whizzing by at 20,000 miles per hour on its way to visit six more objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

“We would get a more detailed view of the asteroid’s surface,” said Hoor al-Mazmi, the mission’s science leader. “And we would understand the asteroid’s internal density and structure.”

The seventh asteroid, Justitia, is the most intriguing. Justitia is about 50 kilometers across and is very reddish, an unusual color for an asteroid. Indeed, it looks more like one of the small icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt, circling the sun beyond Neptune’s orbit.

That has led planetary scientists to speculate that Justitia formed in the outer regions of the solar system, then scattered inwards by the shifting orbits of the giant planets, eventually reaching the asteroid belt.

If true, a visit to Justitia would provide a close-up study of a Kuiper belt object without the long journey to the far reaches of the solar system.

The MBR Explorer is expected to come within a few hundred meters of Justitia in October 2034 and study it for at least seven months with cameras and spectrometers that can identify the asteroid’s composition, including the presence of water. The reddish color is believed to refer to carbon-based molecules that are the building blocks for life. The spacecraft will also drop a small lander to deposit on Justitia’s surface.

With a mass of more than two tons, the MBR Explorer will be larger than Emirates’ Hope spacecraft, which went to Mars. For flybys of the first six asteroids, the spacecraft will travel quickly, requiring precise navigation to ensure instruments are pointed at the asteroid.

“The complexity is increasing,” said Mohsen al-Awadhi, the mission’s program director.

And the spacecraft must launch within a three-week period in March 2028 to make all planned flybys. Then if it doesn’t get off the ground, the entire mission will have to be rescheduled, probably with new asteroid destinations.

To date, NASA, the European Space Agency, China and JAXA, the Japanese space agency, have sent spacecraft to asteroids.

The United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich country slightly smaller than the state of Maine, is a space newcomer. Two decades ago, it had no space program.

Today, it is increasingly active in space, part of an effort to jump-start a high-tech industry in the country in preparation for a future where petroleum is no longer flowing so abundantly. That includes sending astronauts to the International Space Station, with one, Sultan al Neyadicurrently in orbit around the Earth.

In 2009, the first satellite of the Emirates, DubaiSat-1, reached orbit. It was built in South Korea, but Emirati engineers essentially worked as apprentices at the satellite manufacturer. Nine years later, the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai built KhalifaSat, an Earth observation satellite, without foreign aid.

For the Mars mission, the first foray further into the solar system, the Emirates again recruited foreign aid from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Hope launched in July 2020 and arrived in orbit around Mars seven months later. It continues to study how weather conditions such as dust storms in the lower atmosphere affect the rate at which Mars’ thin atmosphere escapes into space. It recently captured high-resolution images of Deimos, the smaller of the two Martian moons.

Emirati space officials discussed ideas about where to go. “We actually looked at the whole solar system in terms of what happens next after the Emirates Mars mission,” Ms al-Amiri said.

Pete Withnell, who served as project manager for the Emirates Mars mission, said the Colorado lab would have “an even more intense involvement” with the new asteroid mission.

Some Emiratis who started building the Hope spacecraft as space novices are now among the leaders of the asteroid mission. So does Mr al-Awadhi, a former maintenance engineer for the Emirates airline who served as the lead systems engineer on the Mars mission.

Mr Withnell said the new spacecraft may be assembled again in Colorado and other organizations will be involved as well. The Italian Space Agency is supplying one of the spectrometer instruments, and San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems is building the two cameras.

But this time, much more will be manufactured in the Emirates. Fifty percent of the money spent on the mission must be spent in-country.

“This is a requirement we didn’t have” for the Mars mission, Mr al-Awadhi said, adding, “That’s a big difference.”

“We are looking at the development of our local industry,” said Ms al-Amiri.

The variety of asteroids that MBR Explorer visits provides useful scientific comparisons for similar asteroids that will be visited on other missions, such as Lucy, a NASA mission that launched in 2021.

“I think it’s a good mission,” Hal Levison, Lucy’s principal investigator, said of the Emirati mission. “It will add something unique that NASA has no intention of doing.”

Planetary scientists may be able to determine whether Justitia is really an invader from the outer solar system. But other bodies believed to be Kuiper belt objects pushed in are more of a grayish-reddish hue. “The interpretation of that is that the sun exposure burns off some of the red stuff as you get closer,” he said.

For example, Justitia, which is as red as a distant Kuiper belt object, seems too red for where it is.

“It gives us a mystery,” said Dr. Levison.