Emirates Mars Mission chief elected to UN committee

The UAE will chair the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), it was announced on Wednesday.

With 100 member states, COPOUS is one of the largest UN committees and plays a major role in governing the exploration and use of space for the benefit of all humanity.

COPUOS was created by the UN General Assembly in 1959 to govern the exploration and use of space. It was tasked with reviewing international cooperation in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, studying space-related activities, encouraging space research programmes and studying and recommending policy and the legal infrastructure supporting space exploration.

Omran Sharaf, Project Director of the Emirates Mars Mission, will chair COPOUS for two years (2022-23). He was the first Emirati engineer to travel to Korea in the country’s technology transfer programme, which saw him working on the development of the DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2 remote sensing satellites. During his time in Korea, Sharaf gained his Master's in Science and Technology Policy from the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea, in 2013

In 2014, he was tasked with the development of the Emirates Mars Mission and its Hope Probe, which is currently orbiting Mars and researching the planet’s atmospheric dynamics. He has previously represented the UAE at COPUOS, the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (ICG) and led the Emirates’ participation in joint studies of emerging space programmes at NATO.