By Elizabeth Gibney

Feature MBRSC

The Mars Hope orbiter at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai. SPACE RACE How a leap to Mars is jump-starting science in the United Arab Emirates. By Elizabeth Gibney

hen the United Arab Emirates Six years on, Al Amiri beamed as she unusually for a space mission, the EMM will (UAE) announced in 2014 that admired the country’s fully assembled Mars release its data to the international scientific it would send a mission to orbiter while it underwent tests in February. community without an embargo (see page 184). Mars by the country’s 50th In the bright, clean room at the Mohammed Progressing from Earth-orbiting satellites birthday in December 2021, bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai, to a deep-space mission in six years is it looked like a bet with astro- engineers were testing the car-sized orbiter “incredible”, says Brett Landin, an engineer at nomically tough odds. At the before shipping it to the Tanegashima Space the University of Colorado Boulder, who leads time, the nation had no space Center in Japan. It will launch sometime during the mission’s spacecraft team. The UAE hired Wagency and no planetary scientists, and had a three-week window starting on 15 July. the US engineer in an unusual partnership in only recently launched its first satellite. The The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) will be the which the Colorado team provided both men- rapidly assembled team of engineers, with an first interplanetary venture of any Arab nation, toring and construction expertise. “I’ve never average age of 27, frequently heard the same but it’s not just a technology demonstrator. seen anything like this before,” says Landin. jibe. “You guys are a bunch of kids. How are Once it arrives at the red planet in February But for Emiratis, space-science goals you going to reach Mars?” says Sarah Al Amiri, 2021, the orbiter, known as Hope (or Amal come second. Faced with economic and originally a computer engineer and the science in Arabic), will produce the first global map environmental challenges, the small, oil- lead for the project. of the Martian atmosphere. And, somewhat rich Gulf state hopes the Mars project can

accelerate its transformation into a knowledge appealing. Although the UAE is famous for its women make up almost 60% of all university economy — by encouraging research, degree breathtaking goals, its citizens are typically graduates and 41% of those in science, tech- programmes in basic sciences and inspiring left with little ambition, says Jon Alterman, nology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), the youth across the Arab states. Like major director of the Middle East Program at the converting this talent into a workforce, port and road ventures before it, the Mars Center for Strategic and International Studies especially in science, has been recognized as mission is a mega-project designed to cause in Washington DC. “The government has been a challenge. “a big shift in the mindset”, says Omran Sharaf, trying for years to create both alternative path- The idea to use Mars both to create science the mission’s project manager. The driver “is ways and alternative incentives to have people jobs and inspire young Emiratis to want to do not space, it’s economic”, he says. aspire to something more than a low-effort them came straight from the top — out of a cab- It is early days, but there are hints that government job,” he says. inet retreat at the end of 2013. Sharaf, then one it is working, says Al Amiri, who is also the The country is not only running out of oil, of the country’s few satellite engineers, got country’s minister for advanced sciences. but also faces major challenges in providing a call directly from the UAE’s vice-president She has assembled a team of planetary sci- enough food and water for its population. and prime minister, Mohammed Bin Rashid entists, who are ‘reprogrammed’ engineers, Emirati undergraduates tend to study engi- Al Maktoum, asking if the country could go and the UAE’s top universities have in the neering or business, but fewer than 5% pursue to Mars by 2021. past few years opened new degree courses in degrees in basic sciences, including medicine, A Mars mission is many times more complex astronomy, physics and other basic sciences. or progress to PhD level. Data from the United than parking a satellite into a low-Earth orbit, Women make up 34% of the team (see ‘Women Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Al Amiri says, and historically around half of in Emirati science’) and 80% of the mission’s Organization data show that the country pro- the trips to the red planet have failed. A Mars- scientists. And the UAE government is now duced no PhD graduates before 2010 — and in bound craft needs to be largely autonomous to mulling involvement in future Moon missions 2017, doctoral students made up less than 0.8% deal with the communications delay to Earth and considering setting up the country’s first of the tertiary-education population, half the (as long as 22 minutes). It must also be able national grant-funding programme. level for the Arab states overall. And although to survive the extreme forces of lift-off and But the UAE has a long way to go. Just a handful employ sophisticated propulsion and naviga- of its 100 or so higher-education institutions tions systems to get into Martian orbit, none do research, and Al Amiri estimates that there of which the UAE had expertise in. “You can’t are perhaps only a few hundred full-time aca- wake up and say I want to go to Mars. I want to demic researchers. Although the country has build a spacecraft. You have to really learn it,” many engineers and technicians, “we’ve discov- says Belhoul. ered we have a big shortage of scientists”, says WHATEVER THE UAE To do it, the country tapped into foreign Ahmad Belhoul, minister for higher education HAS DONE SINCE DAY expertise, using a model that had shown suc- and chair of the UAE Space Agency, which was cess before. In 2007, the UAE had hired South created alongside the Mars mission in 2014. ONE HAS BEEN ABOUT Korean firm Satrec Initiative to design and If they can pull off that economic build its first satellites, with the understand- transformation, it would be a much greater SURVIVAL.” ing that the company would also train Emirati prize than getting data from Mars. Getting to engineers. By 2018, the UAE was able to launch Mars is important, says Al Amiri, but “how we a satellite designed and built entirely at home. get there is even more important”. Applying the same process to the Mars mission, the UAE hired old hands from NASA Beyond petroleum missions, mainly at the University of Colorado Much of the UAE is so new it feels like the Boulder, to work alongside them and provide future. But Dubai’s Burj Khalifa — the world’s training in how to send a probe to another tallest building — and driverless metro system planet. At the outset, Landin, who leads the are a long way from the country’s beginnings mission’s 45-person international spacecraft as a group of impoverished communities from team, says he initially heard people implying distinct tribes that joined forces in the wake of that the UAE might merely be buying its way independence from the United Kingdom in into space. “That is just absolutely, no question 1971. Since then, oil wealth and bold infrastruc- about it, not how this mission worked,” he says. ture projects have helped to turn the desert Sharaf was told by his superiors to “build it, nation into a global business, shipping and not buy it”, to create skills within the UAE itself. tourism hub and one of the richest countries So under Sharaf’s leadership, US and Emirati in the world per capita. “Whatever the UAE has engineers worked together on every part of done since day one has been about survival,” the mission’s development, from design to says Sharaf. manufacture, with work taking place largely But the very sectors that helped the UAE’s in Boulder, but also at the MBRSC. Many of the major cities to thrive have proved vulnerable Emirati engineers, some living away from their to a series of economic crashes, and the Arab families for six months at a time, got the full Spring rocked the region. Some aspects of Rocky Mountain experience, including skiing oil wealth have created long-term problems, and camping. “Some of the friendships I’ve NATURE especially the UAE’s high-paying government made will last forever,” says Landin. jobs and its generous subsidies for citizens, Sharaf declined to provide the mission’s who make up just 12% of the population (which budget, saying the plan is to reveal the overall consists largely of immigrants). Throughout cost once Hope is in orbit around Mars. He the Gulf, these factors have long made jobs in Sarah Al Amiri is science lead for the mission. insists, however, that the speedy six-year turn-

NATALIE NACCACHE FOR FOR NACCACHE NATALIE start-ups, the private sector or research less around is not the result of throwing money at

Feature WOMEN IN EMIRATI SCIENCE

Although women make up a large share of graduates in science and technology, NATALIE NACCACHE FOR NATURE FOR NACCACHE NATALIE those gains have not translated to the workplace.

When the United Arab Emirates’ Mars mission takes off, it will be a victory for the entire country, but particularly for women, who make up 34% of the mission team and 80% of the science team. Women’s representation in the Emirati workforce overall is lower, at 28%, but this is changing despite traditional gender and family roles. In the UAE, women present an unusually large source of talent. Among Emiratis, women account for 56% of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates, which falls to 41% when foreign In the space centre’s clean room, technicians ready the wrapped orbiter for shipping to Japan. students are included. Both are well above the world average. Women also represent the problem. Most important was having the to the mission, say they once felt conspicuous around 70% of all Emirati graduates. leadership’s backing to make swift decisions, at international meetings, because of their The reasons for this are not clear, says says Sharaf. Lacking any home-grown clothing. But now they are frequent fixtures, Maya El-Hachem, a partner at the Boston planetary scientists, who would usually pro- swapping data and giving talks. “Our hijab Consulting Group in Dubai. But, she says, pose payloads in an open process, the mission makes us still stand out,” says Fatma Lootah, a women engage more enthusiastically leaders also saved time by side-stepping the chemical engineer who works on the mission’s in higher education in the country — usual competitive evaluation. ultraviolet spectrometer. “But now I know a lot whereas men often follow business or Training enthusiastic young Emiratis and of people and feel part of the community.” military careers or study abroad. And girls working in a bold, risk-taking environment Lootah hopes that soon there will be science in segregated schools tend, she says, to characteristic of NASA’s early years had the graduates to take up places in the team. get taught by more dedicated teachers, added benefit of making the mission “the Already the MBRSC’s staff has risen from 70 to because the culture has long regarded most exciting thing I’ve done in my career”, more than 200, and the centre regularly sends teaching as a more prestigious job for says Landin, who is a veteran of NASA missions researchers abroad on exchanges as well as women than men. including two Mars rovers. He is often asked hosting undergraduate research interns. Women’s rate of entry into the workplace how the UAE treats women, and he gets a kick Many of those interns come from remains low given their levels of education, out of saying that women are well represented, universities that are just starting to offer says El-Hachem. Some women choose in fact, making up a much bigger share of the academic programmes in related fields. Five not to work and, especially in more Emirati team than for the US counterpart. universities have launched courses in basic conservative parts of the country, families sciences: the American University of Sharjah, expect women to remain close to home, Science aims for example, has started bachelor’s stud- making it hard to follow the job market. For its science goals, the UAE went to the Mars ies in physics, and Khalifa University in Abu And according to Human Rights Watch, Exploration Program Analysis Group, a NASA- Dhabi has begun an aerospace engineering laws still exist that allow levels of domestic led international forum that agrees on gaps in programme. Meanwhile the National Space violence and require Emirati women to get knowledge to tackle in future Mars missions. Science and Technology Center (NSSTC), a male guardian’s permission to marry. “It was very important for us to fit into an founded in 2016 at the United Arab Emirates But the country’s culture has evolved area of science that was relevant not only to University in Al Ain, has quickly become a dramatically over the past 50 years, with the UAE but the global science community,” source of research jobs for graduates. views on women’s roles becoming more says Al Amiri. And the Mars mission is helping to drive liberal every year, says Sarah Al Amiri, the The EMM team then selected instruments more interest in STEM subjects, says Belhoul. UAE’s minister for advanced sciences. and an orbit that would fill a major knowledge Enrolment by UAE nationals in STEM university Women have taken more leading roles in gap: how the Martian atmosphere changes over courses has been rising by around 12% a year, the past decade, spearheaded by their daily and seasonal cycles. Hope’s innovation six times faster than the overall trend in enrol- participation in the government; two-thirds lies in its special orbit. It is taking a wide and ment, with the increase highest in women. of government employees and one-quarter distant route, so it will be the first probe to give Enthusiasm for space is spreading across of ministers are women, she says. In the a comprehensive picture of Mars’s atmosphere, the region, says Belhoul, aided by the UAE’s past three years, the government has also its clouds, gases and dust storms, throughout first astronaut, Hazza Al Mansouri, who went introduced longer maternity leave for its the entire day, rather than at individual time to the International Space Station in 2019. Ear- employees and flexible working. It also slots or locations. The mission’s data will also lier this year, the UAE that announced it would adopted a law this year requiring equal pay be completely open for all to study. lead a consortium of 11 Arab states in building for equal work for women and men. Members of the science team, who went from a climate-monitoring satellite at the NSSTC. being engineers to authoring papers related Since 2014, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have also

established agencies of their own. The EMM is the public face of a wider drive to promote research in the UAE, says Belhoul. Under plans launched in 2017, the country aims to treble the number of home-grown PhD graduates by 2030, which will be complemented by efforts to bring in researchers from abroad through a NATALIE NACCACHE FOR NATURE FOR NACCACHE NATALIE more-flexible visa programme. Belhoul’s ministry hopes that later this year, the cabinet will approve his proposal to create a national competitive research fund that will catalyse the growth of science by providing long-term, stable support across science in universities, including money to attract scholars from abroad. A 100-million dirham (US$27-million) four-year ministry-run pilot is already under way, providing multi-year grants for select research programmes, and the next round should be “much bigger”, he says. The share of the UAE’s gross domestic product spent on R&D has already risen from 0.5% in 2011 to 1.3% in 2018, and is on track to hit its goal of 1.5% by the end of next year. The Muna Al Hammadi, a senior engineer on the project, at work in one of the space centre’s labs. UAE has big plans to keep pushing in space. It plans to build a ‘Mars Science City’ outside SCIENCE ON TE RISE speech since the Arab Spring in 2011, he says. Dubai, which will be devoted to research and The United Arab Emirates has been boosting Scientists who keep out of politics won’t education, as well as entertainment. And like investment in science and technology, which has encounter problems, he says. But researchers coincided with rising numbers of highly cited papers. many other countries, the UAE is also now who voice an opinion that is politically sen- considering putting spacecraft, and perhaps Spending sitive or goes against the UAE government’s people, on the Moon. Northern America United Arab agenda run the risk of arrest and detention, he Europe Emirates Many researchers outside the country are says. “In terms of what can and cannot be said, World Arab states excited at the UAE’s venture into space. “I love the UAE is one of the most heavily surveilled 3.0 listening to the team talk about why they do societies in the world,” he says. Some other the mission, about viewing it as an inspira- 2.5 laws, although rarely enforced, raise concern tional goal giving excitement and hope across 2.0 among foreigners, such as those banning all

the Middle East,” says Danielle Wood, who spe- 1.5 sex outside of heterosexual marriages. cialises in aerospace engineering and policy Maintaining momentum in expanding at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1.0 its science capacity could also prove tough, in Cambridge. 0.5 because the UAE’s economy was struggling

Another stated government plan is to of GDP* as percentage R&D 0 even before the economic slowdown and ultimately be part of a settlement on Mars — 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 halving in crude-oil prices brought by the although not until 2117. “We are still keeping *R&D, research and development; GDP, gross domestic product pandemic. Alterman says that the country our long-term aspiration to go to Mars, but Publication impact has made remarkable progress, but that the United Arab Emirates Middle East the Moon is a stepping stone to getting there,” flip side of its huge ambition could be a lack EU28 – European Union says Belhoul. Even if such announcements of staying power. “Many of the challenges 16 amount to little more than a gimmick, the 14 they’ve had have been staying focused on the Hope mission has genuinely brought skills to 12 follow-through, as there’s always something the UAE, says Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a his- 10 bright and shiny and new on the horizon,” torian of the Gulf at Rice University in Houston, 8 he says. Texas. It has contributed to employing a new 6 Earlier this year, members of the EMM’s generation of Emiratis in science and technol- 4 international review board told Al Amiri that 2

ogy, which is a step on the route to diversifying citation number (%) by back in 2015 they were sceptical that the mis- the economy, he says (see ‘Science on the rise’). 0 sion would work out, although they didn’t tell Share of papers in the top 10% of papers Share Given how recently the country started 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 her then. But she is used to being an underdog. awarding PhD degrees, a boom in STEM edu- Research output “We’re a new country that is late to the com- United Arab Qatar Kuwait Oman cation and research will probably require the Emirates petition in the global perspective. It’s natural input of foreign scientists for now. So far the 3 for people to think this was crazy,” she says. A UAE’s major cities have had no trouble luring country can’t progress as quickly as the UAE business talent from around the world, but 2 has without audacious projects, she says. academics could prove a harder sell. Coates “For us, it’s not a luxury. It’s not a gimmick. Ulrichsen warns that despite the UAE seeing 1 It’s an absolute necessity to develop skills and itself as a tolerant and liberal society (it even (thousands) capabilities and develop a nation as a whole.” has a ‘ministry of tolerance’), the government 0 Number of publications † — one of the world’s few federal monarchies 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 Elizabeth Gibney is a senior reporter with †For co-authored publications, a fraction of each paper is assigned to a country depending on its share of authors. SOURCE: SPENDING, UNESCO; PUBLICATION IMPACT, SCOPUS; RESEARCH OUTPUT, US NATIONAL SCIENCE BOARD SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING INDICATORS 2018 INDICATORS ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE BOARD SCIENCE US NATIONAL OUTPUT, RESEARCH SCOPUS; IMPACT, PUBLICATION UNESCO; SPENDING, SOURCE: — has cracked down harder on freedom of Nature in London.