The UAE’s Hope Probe faces its most rigorous tests this month in preparation for take-off next year on a mission to Mars. With fewer than 250 days until the start of the mission, the focus is on testing the spacecraft to ensure that it withstands the stresses of the launch, said Sarah Bint Yousif Al Amiri, Minister of State for Advanced Sciences. “Our biggest test is at the end of this month,” she told an audience of Emirati students at the Science Museum in London. The Emirates Mars Mission is the first by any Arab or Muslim majority country. A team of Emirati scientists, in collaboration with experts from the US and France, have designed and built the probe. It will take off from Tanegashima Space Centre in Japan next year and is scheduled to reach orbit around Mars more than six months later in 2021. It is expected to collect more than 1,000 gigabytes of data on the weather on Mars that could give insights into tackling global warming on Earth. The event came a day after the return of Hazza Al Mansouri from his eight-day trip to the International Space Station. That mission was a staging post for the UAE’s broader ambitions beginning with the Mars project. “Usually people go to the moon first and then Mars,” said the minister. “We have always done things differently.”