UAE completes its own 10 kg probe for a 2028 mission to touch asteroid Justitia

The probe's next stop is the University of Colorado Boulder, where collaborators will fit it to the main MBR Explorer spacecraft before launch ^[1]. The UAE's space programme grew quickly by hiring international partners to help design and build its spacecraft while training Emirati researchers and engineers ^[14]. That approach produced Hope, which launched in 2020 and entered orbit around Mars in 2021 ^[15].

Najwa Aaraj, chief executive of the Technology Innovation Institute, expects to drop the Colorado stage next time. "I'm very confident that in the next mission, we don't need Colorado," she said. "Everything can be done end-to-end here." ^[13]

The two published accounts disagree about what happens at Justitia. Nature, which spells the name Justicia, describes a probe expected to career into the asteroid in 2035 ^[9]. Scientific American describes a lander. In its account the spacecraft arrives in 2034, orbits for seven months, then releases a probe that will attempt to touch down and analyse the rock's composition ^[5]. The timelines are consistent: a 2034 arrival plus seven months in orbit can put contact in 2035 ^[20]. A probe built to career into a rock and one built to set down on it are different machines, though either one touches the asteroid ^[9][5].

In Nature's account, the scientific case rests on colour. Justitia's red tint suggests it holds material more commonly found further out in the Solar System than its current orbit between Mars and Jupiter ^[6]. Elias Tsoutsanis, chief researcher at the institute's Propulsion and Space Research Center, said that if the asteroid formed in the outer reaches and migrated inward, it would be an ancient "traveller from the past" with clues to how the Solar System formed and where its water came from ^[7]. Scientific American states the origin more firmly, saying the asteroid is believed to have formed in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune ^[8]. A composition measurement at Justitia itself is what would test Tsoutsanis's condition ^[5].

Before the spacecraft gets there, its cameras and spectrometers will analyse six other asteroids remotely ^[3]. It is designed to operate fully autonomously ^[16].

Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, chair of the UAE Space Agency, said enrollment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics has risen 30% since the country announced its Mars mission in 2014 ^[17]. He later told Nature that the number of UAE universities offering aerospace and space-related degrees roughly doubled between 2015 and 2025 ^[18]. The thing those figures don't tell you is whether the space programme caused either increase. As reported, they come without a baseline or a comparison group, so they show only that the rises followed the announcement.