NYU Abu Dhabi to launch first ever Mars Atlas in Arabic

Dimitra Atri, a research scientist from NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), has produced the world’s first-ever Mars Atlas in Arabic. The atlas uses data created exclusively from the UAE’s Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), also known as Hope or Al-Amal, to make the Hope probe’s findings more accessible to both the UAE’s Arabic-speaking population and that of the world.

The Mars Atlas Project combines images that the Hope Probe produces to map out the planet’s surface. The result is a holistic view of Mars and stunning images of a planet that once had similar conditions to Earth.

To achieve this, Atri and his team process observational data from EMM’s Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) instrument, one of the three instruments aboard the orbiter.

This will help the team demonstrate how the planet changes over one Mars year, roughly the equivalent of two Earth years. Updates to the atlas are to be gradually made as more data from the Hope probe becomes available.

This information will allow for a more detailed understanding of the planet’s atmospheric thinning, which has caused it to cool and dry over the past four billion years. Atri further predicts that, in three months, the collected data will be used to address certain unsolved scientific queries concerning the erosion of Mars’ atmosphere, the findings of which will eventually help the international scientific community better understand the atmospheric processes of the Earth.

EMM is the UAE and the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission commissioned by the country’s leaders in 2014. The spacecraft was launched in Japan on July 20, 2020. Seven months later, on February 9, 2021, the Hope probe entered Mars’ orbit. It will continue its scientific mission to explore Mars until the middle of 2023, possibly extending it for an additional Martian year (two Earth years).