Dubai - It was recorded by an astronomy centre in the US.
Published: Wed 22 Jul 2020, 1:35 PM
Updated: Wed 22 Jul 2020, 5:03 PM
The UAE's Hope probe has been spotted in the sky as it cruised its way towards the Red Planet. A short video captured by an observatory in the US has gone viral on social media.
The video, which was tweeted on Monday (the same day Hope was launched into space), shows a speck of light moving quickly across a constellation of stars. It was recorded by an astronomy centre in the US.
At the time it was taken - between 12.22pm and 12.42pm, UAE time - Hope was already 170,000km away from Earth, the centre tweeted. To reach Mars, it will have to travel 493 million kilometres.
The probe, which is the Arab world's first interplanetary mission, blasted off for its seven-month journey at 1.58am on Monday. The first signal from Hope was received around 3.10am, verifying that it is "healthy and successfully cruising towards the Red Planet", officials of the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) earlier said.
It reached its space orbit in just over an hour after it took off from Japan's Tanegashima Space Centre.
"The team is operating on a 24/7 basis now. For two weeks, we are going to have a 24-hour monitoring of the spacecraft. (It all) depends on how quickly we can get through the initial testing and other phases," Omran Sharaf, project manager of the EMM, said during a Press briefing on Monday.
Hope's journey is the first of three international missions to the Red Planet this summer.
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