UAE To Land Probe on Asteroid After 2.2-Billion-mile Trip

The United Arab Emirates is going to land a spacecraft on an asteroid, after a five-year mission (“… to boldly go where no one has gone before…”) in which the spacecraft will travel some 3.6 billion kilometers (2.2 billion miles). The project announced on Tuesday has a target launch in 2028, and its landing on an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter – to collect data on the origins of the universe – is scheduled for 2033. Ultimately, the probe will study seven different asteroids up close before it lands on one of them, located in the main asteroid belt between the fourth and fifth planets. The UAE Space Agency will partner with the Laboratory for Atmospheric Science and Physics at the University of Colorado on the as-yet-unnamed project, whose price tag also has not been announced. It follows the successful project to put the Amal, or “Hope,” probe in orbit around Mars in February. The UAE has also announced that it will send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon in 2024.