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The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) was launched to Mars in the summer of 2020, and is the first interplanetary spacecraft mission undertaken by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The mission has multiple programmatic and scientific objectives, including the return of scientifically useful information about Mars. Three science instruments on the mission’s Hope Probe will make global remote sensing measurements of the Martian atmosphere from a large low-inclination orbit that will advance our understanding of atmospheric variability on daily and seasonal timescales, as well as vertical atmospheric transport and escape. The mission was conceived and developed rapidly starting in 2014, and had aggressive schedule and cost constraints that drove the design and implementation of a new spacecraft bus. A team of Emirati and American engineers worked across two continents to complete a fully functional and tested spacecraft and bring it to the launchpad in the middle of a global pandemic. EMM is being operated from the UAE and the United States (U.S.), and will make its data freely available.

The Emirates will shortly join the ranks of space-faring nations by sending an orbiter to Mars, aiming to make novel observations and inspire the country, write the mission leadership team.

The Axial Double Probe (ADP) instrument measures the DC to ∼100 kHz electric field along the spin axis of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft (Burch et al., Space Sci. Rev., 2014, this issue ), completing the vector electric field when combined with the spin plane double probes (SDP) (Torbert et al., Space Sci. Rev., 2014, this issue , Lindqvist et al., Space Sci. Rev., 2014, this issue ). Two cylindrical sensors are separated by over 30 m tip-to-tip, the longest baseline on an axial DC electric field ever attempted in space. The ADP on each of the spacecraft consists of two identical, 12.67 m graphite coilable booms with second, smaller 2.25 m booms mounted on their ends. A significant effort was carried out to assure that the potential field of the MMS spacecraft acts equally on the two sensors and that photo- and secondary electron currents do not vary over the spacecraft spin. The ADP on MMS is expected to measure DC electric field with a precision of ∼1 mV/m, a resolution of ∼25 μV/m, and a range of ∼±1 V/m in most of the plasma environments MMS will encounter. The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) units on the MMS spacecraft are designed to perform analog conditioning, analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion, and digital processing on the ADP, SDP, and search coil magnetometer (SCM) (Le Contel et al., Space Sci. Rev., 2014, this issue ) signals. The DSP units include digital filters, spectral processing, a high-speed burst memory, a solitary structure detector, and data compression. The DSP uses precision analog processing with, in most cases, >100 dB in dynamic range, better that −80 dB common mode rejection in electric field ( E ) signal processing, and better that −80 dB cross talk between the E and SCM ( B ) signals. The A/D conversion is at 16 bits with ∼1/4 LSB accuracy and ∼1 LSB noise. The digital signal processing is powerful and highly flexible allowing for maximum scientific return under a limited telemetry volume. The ADP and DSP are described in this article.

An analgesic mixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen (Entonox) has been used in nine ambulances in Gloucestershire for self-administration by patients in severe pain. Over a period of three and a half months 66 patients have been treated. In all cases the pain was wholly or partially relieved, and in no instance was the patient's condition worsened. No undesirable side-effects attributable to Entonox were produced. It is recommended that other ambulance authorities should consider the use of Entonox in this context.