Abu Dhabi professor creates Mars atlas in Arabic

A UAE-based professor has created the world’s first ever atlas of Mars in Arabic.

Dimitra Atri, a research scientist at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) produced the atlas using data from the UAE’s Hope probe.

The atlas aims to make the Emirates Mars Mission's (EMM) findings more accessible to the Arabic-speaking population around the world.

It combines different images that the Hope probe is producing to map out the planet’s surface.

The result is a holistic view of Mars and stunning images of a planet that once held very similar conditions to Earth.

In order to achieve this, Atri and his team process observational data from EMM’s Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) instrument, one of the three instruments aboard the orbiter.

This will help the team demonstrate how the planet changes over the period of one Mars year, which is roughly the equivalent of two Earth years.

Updates to the atlas are to be gradually made as more data from the Hope probe becomes available.

Atri predicts that, in three months, the collected data will be used to address certain unsolved scientific queries concerning the erosion of Mars’ atmosphere, the findings of which will eventually help the international scientific community better understand the atmospheric processes of the Earth.