Ambitious Mission from the United Arab Emirates to Fly Closely by Seven Main-belt Asteroids.

 United Arab Emirates Announces New Mission to the Asteroid Belt,     in Sky and Telescope By David Dickerson,  May 31 2023  

An ambitious new mission from the United Arab Emirates would fly closely and speedily by seven main-belt asteroids.

MBR mission  An artist's concept of MBR passing an asteroid. UAE Space Agency

The United Arab Emirates announced earlier this week its formal plans to send a mission to the asteroid belt in a grand tour past seven targets.

The working name for the mission is the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (MBR). That acronym echoes that of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum (MBR).

“This mission is a follow up and a follow-on to the Mars mission, where it was the first mission to Mars from the region,” says project director Mohsen Al Awadhi (UAE Space Agency). “We’re creating the same thing with this mission. That is, the first mission ever to explore these seven asteroids specifically, and the first of its kind when it's looked at from the grand tour aspect.”

A GRAND TOUR OF THE ASTEROID BELT

The mission has a three-week long launch window that opens on March 3, 2028. No launch carrier or launch site has been announced yet. For gravitational assists to the asteroid belt, the mission will first make multiple flybys past Venus, Earth, and Mars, starting with Venus in July 2028, before arriving at the first asteroid target, 10253 Westerwald, in February 2030.

UAE Space Agency

The mission will target the following asteroids: 10253 Westerwald, 623 Chimaera, 13294 Rockox, and three asteroids without official names (yet): 2000 VA28 (88055), 1998 RC76 (23871), and 1999 SG6 (59980). The UAE probe will be traveling at 20,500 miles per hour (9 km per second) and will pass just 150 kilometers (93 miles) from each target.

The climax of the mission will occur in 2034, when the spacecraft will dispatch a lander in an attempt to touchdown on the 54-kilometer-wide asteroid 269 Justitia.  ...'

Making it Rain

 Back long ago was part of a group that investigated the ability to make it rain.  Aimed at general agriculture  Its a long ago desire, with many failures and also expression of pitfalls involved.  Well here it is again.   Now working they say. By the UAE, using Drones.  Looking deeper to see how it might link to what we did then. 

Weather Control via Drone,  By Logan Kugler,  Commissioned by CACM Staff, September 2, 2021

A remarkable video released by the National Center of Meteorology of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) shows a rarity: a heavy downpour of rain in the desert.

However, the rain isn't the rare part (although the UAE gets just about four inches of rain per year). What's rare is the rain's source: the downpour was caused by drones.

Unmanned drones flew into a bank of clouds, then used electricity to cause the droplets locked in the clouds to fall. The result was a man-made downpour.

The project is based on research from the U.K.'s University of Reading, where researchers modeled and measured how rain droplets in a cloud behave when electrically charged. Theoretically, if two droplets have the same charge, they may be attracted to each other and merge; the new, bigger droplet may then be heavy enough to fall. Charge enough droplets and you can, in theory, induce rainfall.

The footage released by the UAE suggests this type of weather control works in practice.

It is the latest effort at "cloud seeding," which is the practice of inducing rain by dispersing material into the clouds to encourage condensation. Cloud seeding has been practiced for the last 50 years, says Daniel Rosenfeld, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and an expert in weather modification. Historically, a number of means have been used to induce rain in clouds, including dropping salt into them, a process the UAE already uses for cloud seeding.

Drones armed with electrical charges are just the latest in a string of attempts to coax rain from the sky via cloud seeding. This attempt, funded by the United Arab Emirates Rain Enhancement Program (UAE REP), may be more significant than past efforts, because cloud seeding runs into some big obstacles that the drone program is trying to solve, says Rosenfeld.

It is difficult to measure how well cloud seeding methods work, since you never know how much rain would have fallen without the seeding. It's also hard to tell which clouds are ripe for seeding in the first place, and even if you find clouds bearing enough droplets, seeding them in a timely fashion is not easy.

"The UAE REP program is a serious effort to address all these questions in a scientifically sound way," says Rosenfeld. As part of the program, the UAE government gave research teams at the University of Reading one of nine grants totaling $15 million.

The Reading researchers used their funding across multiple projects that led to the drone cloud seeding.

First, they simulated the behavior of water droplets in clouds. Researchers Torsten Auerswald and Maarten Ambaum used a technique called "ABC flow" to model how droplets behave. Because the technique simulates motion using far less computing power than other methods, they also were able to simulate how electrical charges could influence droplets, providing a clear, measurable picture of how electric-charge cloud seeding could work.  .... '