The launch of the UAE's mission to Mars made headlines around the world, but there was another, more complex, Emirati mission brewing in the background – codenamed Max.
About a year before the Hope probe blasted off in 2020, the UAE Space Agency started brainstorming ideas that would take the country's ambitions beyond the Red Planet and test the limits of its engineers and private space sector.
After considering a few missions, the agency came up with a concept plan of a mission to the main asteroid belt in 2019.
It would mean a journey that would take an Emirati spacecraft on a 5 billion km trip to a region between Mars and Jupiter – seven times the distance the Hope probe travelled to reach the Red Planet in February 2021 – to study numerous asteroids.
“The initial idea of what should we do after the Emirates Mars Mission actually started one or two years prior to the launch of the Hope probe,” Sarah Al Amiri, Minister of State for Public Education and Advanced Technology, and chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency, exclusively told The National on Wednesday.
“We were looking at how do you take capabilities that were developed across the Emirates Mars Mission and plug it into another mission.
“And then have the other mission become a wider, overarching programme that takes transfer of know-how to the next level.”
She said the agency considered a second mission to the Moon's surface, but the journey to the asteroid belt would “up the game” and would allow it to design a much more advanced spacecraft and tap into interesting science.
It took nearly four years for the agency to map out the project, with hushed tones around the secret mission known as multiple asteroid exploration, or Max.
A few details of the mission were made public in 2021, but it still did not have a name then, nor a concrete science or spacecraft design plan.
