The first Arab mission to Mars is delivering some interesting science

arstechnica.com

28 points·carride··7 comments

Arab funded. Built and researched in the US and launched by the Japanese.

I wonder why they didn't perform more engineering at home.

Sounds like a missed opportunity.

UAE is best understood as an international haven (tax, airline passenger routing, container transboarding) operated by expats (the fearful rich from authoritarian countries, westerners administrating an EMEA operation, workers from India), and controlled by Emiratis (100% of police, judiciary, government decision-taking)

They represent only 20% of the population in their own country (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriates_in_the_United_Ar....)

So, it makes no sense engaging the volatile expat population in this project, and they just don't have the critical human resources to do it within their population.

They do like vanity projects, though.

See also: Burj Khalifa, Palm Jumeirah, Mall with a ski slope, Mall with a whale aquarium, etc

Source: did an internship in this quite weird place

Mostly right except Indians and Pakistanis make up most of the police force, business owners and government workers as well.

Oh yeah. Definitely doing the decision-taking but not the decision-executing.

Good goal. Some US and EU (and China?) missions still don't openly release their data, I believe.

> One goal of the mission was to share the resulting data freely, and as a result, the mission recently opened a science data portal [1]. Anyone can register to get access to raw images and data collected by the probe in the past, with new data sets being released every three months, without embargo.

[1] https://sdc.emiratesmarsmission.ae/

Like the 'american' mission to the moon. A stolen V2 Nazi rocket with a bigger fuel tank, lol.

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