The United Arab Emirates had its sights set on Mars the day before it launched its second satellite ever.
The resulting mission, a Mars orbiter dubbed Hope, has finished construction and is scheduled to launch this summer among a rush of spacecraft bound for the Red Planet. If all goes well, the UAE will become the fourth or fifth country to orbit Mars next February. While the country's newly minted scientists are dedicated to learning something new about Mars, inquiry wasn't the motivation for the mission.
"Going to Mars was not the main objective," Omran Sharaf, mission lead for the Hope spacecraft, which is also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, told Space.com. "It's a means for a bigger goal: to expedite the development in our educational sector, academic sector."