The mission is to send a probe on a 60 million kilometre journey to orbit Mars, in order to help discover why the Red Planet – thought once to have had water like Earth – is now dry.
Fittingly, this project is being undertaken by the desert state of the United Arab Emirates.
It’s the first space exploration mission ever to be launched by an Arab state, and the UAE’s space agency has just five years to build the probe and all its components. Details