Pointing and Alignment for the Emirates Mars Mission

The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) will be the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) first mission to explore another planet in our solar system. The mission is designed to study the Martian atmospheric circulation and connections via measurements using three instruments that observe Mars in the visible, thermal infrared, and ultraviolet wavelengths. The measurements are collected at all times of day over a full Martian year. In this paper we will show the approach to defining, measuring, verifying and validating the pointing metrics and alignments for each instrument necessary to obtain a spatial resolution of 10 km for visible imagery, 300 km for infrared spectroscopy, and 100 km for the ultraviolet spectroscopy of the lower and upper atmosphere from orbital altitudes ranging between 20,000 and 43,000 km. We will detail the methods of specifying the alignment requirements to the spacecraft subsystems and the payload suite and go through the measurement process that shows EMM can achieve the pointing control, knowledge, jitter, and stability metrics.