DUBAI: A 33-year-old woman, Sarah Al Amiri has led the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Hope orbiter mission to Mars as a deputy project manager and become the youngest female Muslim scientist worldwide.
The UAE) on Tuesday became successful in inserting a spacecraft into orbit around Mars on the first try. The mission was announced in 2014 and the Hope probe succeeded in entering the planet’s orbit on February 9.
Leading the science mission as the deputy project manager is Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, a computer engineer and also the country’s first Minister of State for Advanced Sciences. The Iranian-born Al Amiri is one of the youngest ministers worldwide and is also the youngest to lead a space agency.
Al Amiri became the program manager for advanced aerial systems in the country’s space center in 2014. She was responsible for putting together the engineering team for the space agency.
Al Amiri became the country’s first Minister of State for Advanced Sciences on 19 October 2017. In August 2020, she became the chairperson of the UAE Space Agency.
Al Amiri is also the chairperson of UAE’s space agency Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, which developed the Hope orbiter (or Al Amal), in conjunction with the University of Colorado Boulder, University of California-Berkeley and Arizona State University.
She was invited by the World Economic Forum to speak at Davos 2019, and also became the first citizen of UAE to speak at an international TED event. Al Amiri was also covered by BBC’s 100 Women, a documentary series that examines the role and lives of women in the 21st century globally.
Today, I participated at the Emirates Society’s webinar alongside @MansoorAbulhoul, the UAE’s ambassador to the UK, Sir Ian Blatchford, the Director of the Science Museum and @OmranSharaf, the Project Director of Emirates Mars Mission to talk about the Hope Mission to Mars. pic.twitter.com/mDDvOpzCz4
— Sarah Al Amiri (@SarahAmiri1) February 1, 2021
