A spacecraft of the United Arab Emirates has taken a flight into space, while the country’s economy is sinking under the coronavirus crisis and falling oil prices. The UAE Mars mission 2020 is another card from the deck of diversity plans. Where some proved to be ace cards, the latest is encircled with added doubts over its success.
The Emirates had initiated its drive to diversify and to keep its economy flourishing, as it planned to end the dependency on oil. Over the years, it has managed to construct pillars of tourism and real estate to support the economic structure. The UAE is now aiming for stars, with an addition of space programs to the development process. The hopes are high, but the base of the country’s constitution remains hollow.
Last month, seeds of the UAE Mars mission 2020 were planted, which will start reap the results from February 2021 till next two years. The Mars probe has been named Al-Amal, meaning hope, where an orbiter which has been launched to study the red planet from above the planet. On the morning of July 20, a Mitsubishi H-IIA rocket took flight with a UAE spacecraft from the Japanese space center Tanegashima.
After an hour, the 3,000 Pound-Hope orbiter, expected to join a fleet of six other spacecrafts studying Mars, detached itself from the launcher rocket. UAE’s spacecraft is carrying three instruments, including an ultraviolet spectrometer, an infrared spectrometer and a camera. From an orbit, whose height above the surface varies from 12,400 miles to 27,000 miles, the orbiter will enable the scientists to fetch the Martian weather updates throughout the day.
The UAE Mars mission 2020 will probe into the effects of dust storms and other weather phenomena on the red planet’s atmosphere into space. However, the Gulf nation appears to have blinded to the recession that its Emirate cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi are witnessing.
Moody’s Corporation estimated that Dubai’s economy will witness acute negative growth and fiscal implications, due the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first quarter, the city’s real gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 3.5 per cent year-on-year. The prolonged lockdown in Dubai also wounded the economy, where many businesses suffered.
The overall economy of the UAE shrank by 1 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter, where the non-oil GDP dropped by 3 per cent. According to the central bank, as the economic activity slowed down, it could induce an economy contraction by 3.6 per cent for the country, this year.
In an intoxication of creating a liberal image, the country intolerant towards political criticism is only playing on the bragging cards. There is a hype about the UAE Mars mission 2020, but the country’s economic situation is as empty as the red planet that it is attempting to study.
