ABU DHABI (The Thursday Times) — The UAE Space Agency has unveiled, for the first time in public, the spacecraft built for its most ambitious mission to date: an eight-year journey that will take a probe past seven asteroids before it attempts a landing on one of them, deep in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The probe, known as the MBR Explorer after the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) that built it, was shown to the public at a press conference in Abu Dhabi in early October. Engineers displayed a half-scale working model alongside the flight hardware still being finished in MBRSC’s clean rooms, where technicians in white coats continue to test its instruments ahead of shipping.
Seven asteroids, one landing
The mission’s profile is unusually ambitious for a space programme not yet twenty years old. After launching from Japan in March 2028, the probe will spend eight years crossing the solar system, using gravity assists to thread a path through the main asteroid belt and fly past seven separate asteroids along the way, gathering close-up data on bodies that have barely been studied.
The mission’s final act is the boldest part: an attempt to land on 269 Justitia, a dark, carbon-rich asteroid that scientists believe may hold organic compounds left over from the early solar system. A successful landing would make the UAE one of only a handful of nations to have placed a spacecraft on an asteroid’s surface.
“This is a significant turning point in our ambition to become a leading spacefaring nation,” the UAE Space Agency said as it unveiled the probe.
The sums behind the programme are striking for a country of under 10 million people. Officials say the UAE’s space sector has now attracted AED44bn ($12bn) in cumulative investment, spread across satellite manufacturing, launch services, Earth observation and the deep-space science that the MBR Explorer represents.
A programme still finding its stride
The asteroid mission is best understood as the newest step in a sequence rather than a one-off. The Hope Probe reached Mars orbit in 2020, making the UAE the fifth nation to successfully reach the planet and the first Arab nation to do so. The Rashid Rover followed in 2022, built for a (so far unsuccessful) attempt at a lunar landing, but valuable all the same for the engineering base it built inside MBRSC.
Each mission has been treated inside MBRSC as training for the next, with Emirati engineers taking on progressively larger shares of the design work rather than outsourcing it. That approach is why officials describe the asteroid mission less as a single achievement and more as evidence that the country’s space ambitions have become self-sustaining.
What it means on the ground
For a country whose economy was built on oil, a credible deep-space programme does quieter work than the headlines suggest: it is a magnet for the kind of engineering and aerospace talent the UAE wants to keep inside its borders as it diversifies away from hydrocarbons, and a visible signal to investors that the state is capable of funding long-horizon science rather than only short-cycle infrastructure.
The probe is due to begin final pre-launch testing in 2027, with the Japan launch window opening in March 2028. If it reaches 269 Justitia on schedule, the landing would come in the mid-2030s — a long wait, but one the agency says it is prepared to make good on, given its record over the last six years.∎
