Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center

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Muhammad bin Raschid Al Maktum

The Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center ( Arabic مركز محمد بن راشد للفضاء, DMG Markaz Muḥammad bin Rāšid li-l-Faḍāʾ ), also known abroad under the abbreviation “MBRSC” because of the English name Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center , is a state institution of the Emirate of Dubai that carries a large part of the space program of the United Arabs Emirates denies, among other things the astronaut program of the UAE and the Mars mission al-Amal . The space center is located in the al-Khwaneej 1 district of Dubai , and its general director has been Yousuf Hamad al-Shaibani since 2013.

Emirates Institute of Advanced Science and Technology

On January 4, 2006, after the death of his eldest brother , Muhammad bin Rashid al-Maktum became Emir of Dubai and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates. One month later, on February 6, 2006, he founded the Emirates Institute of Advanced Science and Technology by decree ( Arabic مؤسسة الإمارات للعلوم والتقنية المتقدمة, DMG Muʾassasat ul-Imārāt lil-ʿUlum wal-Taqniat il-Mutaqadima ), also known abroad under the abbreviation "EIAST" because of the English name Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology . Contrary to what the name suggests, this is not an initiative of the United Arab Emirates, but of Dubai alone. Ahmed Obaid al-Mansuri became director general of the institute. Even if the institute's self-portrayal spoke a lot about far-reaching goals such as sustainable development and the establishment of a knowledge society , in practice it was initially only about earth observation satellites to obtain precise geographic information for various applications.

DubaiSat 1

The institute was a space agency from the start. In September 2007 it was announced that the earth observation satellite DubaiSat 1 would be launched the following year ; the satellite should make Dubai one of the world's leading nations in science and technology. However, the emirate of Dubai, with a population of almost 1.5 million at the time, had absolutely no industrial base to operate space travel. Therefore, in May 2006, a contract was signed with the South Korean Satrect Initiative GmbH in Daejeon , a company founded in 1999 by space engineers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) specializing in small satellites and technology transfer. A group of EIAST engineers was sent to Korea to take part in the development and construction of the approximately 200 kg satellite based on the Satrec SI-200 bus . The ground station with an antenna of 11.3 m diameter behind the main building of the institute in Dubai was built by the Californian Viasat Inc., the data processing systems in the control center, also at the institute's headquarters, were supplied by Satrec. Originally the launch was planned for the end of 2008, actually dubaisat-1 was then on 29 July 2009 by the ISC Kosmotras with a Ukrainian carrier rocket of the type Dnepr from Baikonur Cosmodrome launched. On November 21, 2013, the DubaiSat 2, also built by Satrec and based on the company's slightly larger SI-300 bus, followed . At 300 kg, the satellite weighed around 100 kg more than its predecessor, and its camera had a resolution more than twice as high. The launch was again organized by Kosmotras, again with a Dnepr rocket, but this time from the Russian Cosmodrome Jasny .

Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center

In connection with the Mars mission known today as " al-Amal ", a project initiated by Muhammad bin Raschid al-Maktum, Chalifa bin Zayid an-Nahyan , President of the United Arab Emirates, founded on August 6, 2014 with Federal Decree No. 1/2014 the space agency of the Emirates . Almost eight months later, on April 17, 2015, Muhammad bin Rashid al-Maktum founded the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) by decree, and the following day the EIAST was integrated into the new space center by decree. This was purely an administrative process. The Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center was not a newly created facility, just a new name for the old institute; the old buildings with the control center and the parabolic antenna in the courtyard were still used. In June 2015, Muhammad bin Rashid al-Maktum appointed his second eldest son, Hamdan bin Muhammad al-Maktum , the Crown Prince of Dubai, as head of the space center, and in July 2015, Hamad Obaid al-Mansuri, Director General of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of the United Arab Emirates and Deputy Head of the Emirates Space Agency, in addition to being appointed Chairman of the Directorate of the Space Center. Yousef Ahmed al-Shaibani was his deputy. Yousuf Hamad al-Schaibani, who had held this post at EIAST since 2013, remained General Director.

Khalifa Sat

Khalifa Sat

The four-year project to develop Dubai's third earth observation satellite was launched back in 2013. In contrast to its two predecessors, which were built entirely in Korea, the final assembly of the 330 kg satellite, initially known as “DubaiSat 3”, was to take place in Dubai. In February 2014, the then EIAST publicly presented the plans for the satellite, which has now been renamed “ KhalifaSat ” in honor of Chalifa bin Zayid an-Nahyan, at a space conference in Singapore . At the same time, a few smaller clean rooms and laboratories were initially set up at the EIAST headquarters in Dubai , which were completed in November 2014. The large clean room for the final assembly of the satellite was ready for use at the end of 2015.

Originally it was announced that KhalifaSat would be developed 100% by engineers from the United Arab Emirates, a fiction that the Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center maintained until 2020. In truth, only 30% of the engineers were from the Emirates, 70% were Koreans. In a first phase, the EIAST engineers traveled to Daejeon at the beginning of 2014 to work on the drafts together with their colleagues from Satrec GmbH, which had been commissioned again. Like DubaiSat-2, KhalifaSat was based on Satrec's SI-300 bus and weighed 330 kg. The design work was completed on October 15, 2014, and the EIAST team returned to Dubai in February 2015.

In a second phase, Satrec GmbH successively sent the components built in Korea for the bus, the electrics and the optics of the satellite to Dubai. In the spring of 2015, the EIAST engineers assembled a prototype of the housing and began to insert the remaining components in order to check the concept of the satellite on this model by means of extensive tests. This so-called Critical Design Review was completed in December 2015. In March 2015, EIAST had already signed a contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to launch the satellite with an H-2A launcher in the first quarter of 2018. In fact, the launch from Tanegashima Space Center took place on October 29, 2018. The systems for receiving and processing the images from the earth observation satellite were supplied by Satrec from Korea; the old 11.3 m parabolic antenna from Viasat Inc. from California was used as the antenna. Dubai does not have its own tracking stations; The orbit elements for the 3-axis stabilized satellites are supplied by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) as so-called Two Line Elements (TLE).

Here is a comparison of the three Earth observation satellites funded by Dubai:

DubaiSat 1 DubaiSat 2 Khalifa Sat
Manufacturer Satrec, Korea Satrec, Korea Satrec, Korea
bus SI-200 SI-300 SI-300
Dimensions 200 kg 300 kg 330 kg
orbit SSE 680 km; 98.1 ° SSE 600 km; 97.1 ° SSE 613 km; 97.1 °
resolution panchromatic 2.5 m,
multispectral 5 m		 panchromatic 1 m
multispectral 4 m		 panchromatic 0.75 m,
multispectral 3 m
Swath width 20 km 12 km 12 km
On-board storage 64 Gbit 256 Gbit 512 Gbit
Download speed 30 Mbit / s 160 Mbit / s 320 Mbit / s
Start date July 29, 2009 November 21st 2013 October 29, 2018
Launch site Baikonur Cosmodrome
Kazakhstan 		Jasny Cosmodrome
Russia		 Tanegashima Space Center
Japan
Launcher Dnepr , Ukraine Dnepr, Ukraine H-2A , Japan

al-Amal

The Mars mission al-Amal , which was launched on July 16, 2014 , is officially under the umbrella of the space agency of the Emirates , but is in fact an initiative of Muhammad bin Raschid al-Maktum and on the Emirate side is run solely by Muhammad bin Raschid - Space Center carried out:

  • Omran Anwar Scharaf, the project manager of the mission, was one of the first employees of EIAST in 2006 and is now head of the project management department at the MBRSC
  • Suhail Buti al-Mheiri, deputy project manager, was also one of the first employees of the EIAST in 2006 and is now head of the space systems section at the MBRSC
  • Sarah bint Yousif al-Amiri, deputy project manager and chief scientist of the mission, began her professional career at EIAST in 2009 as a software developer for DubaiSat 1 and DubaiSat 2 and was head of the drone program until she moved to the cabinet of the United Arab Emirates in 2017 MBRSC

The Muhammad bin Raschid Space Center was only responsible for project management. The actual development and construction of the probe were again held abroad, this time at the Laboratory of High atmospheres - and space weather research (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics) of the University of Colorado Boulder , with the support of scientists of the Laboratory for Space Sciences ( Space Sciences Laboratory ) of the University of California, Berkeley and the Institute of Earth and space exploration ( School of Earth and space exploration ) of Arizona State University .

As of 2014, 250 American technicians and engineers were working on the probe under the direction of Pete Withnell in Boulder together with a few dozen colleagues from Dubai. After the probe passed the temperature and vacuum tests in the high-atmosphere research laboratory in December 2019, it was brought to Dubai to test the communication between the probe and the control center. These communication tests in the Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center should last until May 2020. However, as it was feared that the number of COVID-19 cases in Japan, from where the probe was to be launched, and the United Arab Emirates could continue to increase, combined air and sea transport to Tanegashima was brought forward to the fourth week of April, before all tests could be performed. The probe should definitely arrive at Mars on the 50th birthday of the United Arab Emirates in 2021, and the next launch window did not appear until 2022. On July 19, 2020, the probe lifted off without any problems on board an H-2A launcher from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Tanegashima Space Center .

Astronaut program

The United Arab Emirates astronaut program was founded in April 2017 by Muhammad bin Raschid al-Maktum together with Muhammad bin Zayid an-Nahyan , Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United Arab Emirates . The goal was to set up a so-called "astronaut corps" for scientific space missions, whereby this was not located under the umbrella of the space agency , but was subordinated to the regulatory authority for telecommunications.

Hassa al-Mansuri, the United Emirates' first astronaut

In practice, the astronaut program is carried out by the Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center. After the program was announced, by March 2018 exactly 4022 citizens of the United Arab Emirates had applied for an astronaut career, 34% of them women. 22% of the applicants were pilots, 60% scientists and engineers. After reviewing the documents, 95 of the 4022 applicants were subjected to a more detailed assessment based on medical and psychometric criteria and their professional skills. After this assessment, which was based solely on the files, 39 applicants were invited to the MBRSC in June 2018, where they were questioned in detail by specialists from the space center and had to undergo a medical examination and numerous psychological tests. The next selection round began on July 3, 2018, with talks in which not only the experts from the MBRSC took part, but also representatives of foreign space agencies.

In the meantime, the Muhammad bin Raschid Space Center had signed an agreement with the Russian space agency Roscosmos that an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates should fly on board a Soyuz MS spacecraft to the international space station ISS and take part in scientific research there. The international commission in Dubai first selected 18 from the original 39 applicants, then in a second round 9 candidates, who were sent to the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training center near Moscow to use centrifuges, vacuum chambers, etc. over a period of three weeks their actual aptitude to be tested as a space traveler (the MBRSC does not have any space medicine facilities). The four men who formed the United Arab Emirates' astronaut corps have now been selected from these nine candidates.

On September 3, 2018, Muhammad bin Raschid al-Maktum finally announced that the fighter pilot Hassa al-Mansuri and Sultan an-Nejadi , computer scientist with the armed forces of the UAE, had been selected for the flight to the ISS. Since no for the two spacewalk was scheduled, they underwent a highly abbreviated training - the regular astronaut training lasts four years - and one of them was in April 2019 MS-12 Soyuz to the ISS. For technical reasons, however, Roskosmos had to reschedule the team planning. On April 12, 2019, the Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center announced that it had selected Hassa al-Mansuri for the Soyuz MS-15 primary team. On September 25, 2019, he finally took off into space as the first citizen of the United Arab Emirates and after Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud from Saudi Arabia in 1985 and Muhammed Achmed Faris from Syria in 1987 as the third Arab ever.

Drone program

At the beginning of 2014, the then EIAST started a drone program, the so-called "Advanced Aerial Systems Program", under the direction of the computer scientist Sarah bint Yousif al-Amiri. In doing so, they used Airbus Defense and Space and their high altitude platform ( High Altitude Pseudo Satellite or "HAPS") Zephyr 6 , which is powered by electricity from solar cells . From March 2014, EIAST engineers worked with their colleagues from Airbus on a demonstration model. In August of that year the components were delivered to Dubai, where they were assembled and tested. The 34 kg aircraft with a wingspan of 18 m carried a video camera as its payload, which offered a resolution of 10 cm at an altitude of 18 km. The device was launched on September 11, 2014 at 06:31 am on the Margham oil field in the east of the emirate and landed after 23 hours and 47 minutes of uninterrupted flight at 06:18 the following day.

In September 2014 it was said that EIAST would develop the next generation of the Zephyr together with Airbus and that components for it could be manufactured in Dubai from 2016. After the establishment of the Muhammad bin Raschid Space Center, however, these plans were not pursued further; it stayed with the one prototype. The drone program itself continued to operate at a low level for a while. From October 2015, the MBRSC supported the UAE Drones for Good Award , a handicraft competition for students sponsored by the Dubai Future Foundation .

Web links

Individual evidence

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Coordinates: 25 ° 13 ′ 33.4 ″  N , 55 ° 27 ′ 54.9 ″  E