A United Arab Emirates (UAE) spacecraft will visit an asteroid that could contain the building blocks of life in about a decade if all goes as planned. In October 2021, the UAE announced plans to launch an ambitious mission to the asteroid belt in 2028. This mission will visit seven different space rocks and even land on one of them, an asteroid (269) Justitia.

On Sunday, May 28, the country gave us new information about this daring asteroid mission, including the Emirates Mission Asteroid Belt (EMA).

“We will never stop looking ahead; “We will never stop our efforts to create a bright future for our younger generation,” said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai. says message.

As we learned on Sunday, the EMA spacecraft will be named after the sheikh: it will be called the MBR Explorer.

MBR Explorer will visit its first asteroid in 2030, following an orbital path that will allow it to pick up speed from several planets along the way. (Spacecraft often get this type of “gravity assist” from worlds like Venus or Mars to save fuel and make side-by-side observations to test their devices.)

After passing by six asteroids, the mission plans to land on Justicia in 2034 with a small lander to be deployed from the MBR Explorer. There may be organic molecules on the surface of justice; organic substances are the building blocks of complex molecules that can form life under the right conditions.

More generally, scientists seek water and organic matter throughout the solar system to better understand how life on Earth arose. The search could be of particular importance for Justicia, which may have formed closer to our planet and later migrated to its current location between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, the scientists said.

The remainder of the mission statement includes asteroids (10254) Westerwald, (623) Chimera, (13294) Rocox; The UAE Space Agency said in a statement that (88055) 2000 VA28, (23871) 1998 RC76 and (59980) 1999 SG6 should represent “different classes of asteroids with different types of composition”. Justicia and Chimera are about 50 kilometers (31 miles) in diameter, while the other asteroids are less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) each.

Four science instruments have been announced to study the geology, composition, and structure of asteroids: high-resolution camera, thermal infrared camera, medium wavelength spectrometer, and infrared spectrometer.

The UAE Space Agency was established in 2014 and is one of the youngest space agencies in the world; By comparison, NASA was formed in 1958 from previous US government groups. The UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter, launched in 2020, became the first Arab spacecraft to reach the Red Planet on its maiden test run.

The UAE’s first astronaut, Khazaa Al Mansouri, was launched on a short-duration mission to the International Space Station in 2019. Another UAE astronaut is currently in orbit: Sultan Al Neyadi, who was launched to the orbiting laboratory in March as part of the SpaceX Crew-6 mission.