TII eyes commercial uses for the AI brain of its homebuilt asteroid probe

The UAE’s first fully homebuilt deep-space probe is ready to ship, and TII sees potential beyond the asteroid belt. The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) yesterday unveiled the completed probe it built for MBR Explorer in Abu Dhabi, which was designed, built, and tested entirely in Abu Dhabi for the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt. Etihad Airways will be transporting the probe to the University of Colorado Boulder for integration into the spacecraft, which will launch in March 2028 from Japan.

The mothership: The probe will fly aboard MBR Explorer, the UAE Space Agency's spacecraft for the mission, which will fly past six asteroids between Mars and Jupiter on a 5 bn km journey before making contact with the surface of asteroid 269 Justitia in early 2036.

The numbers: The probe was developed in roughly 18 months after funding came through, by a team that grew from 40 to 55 people, the project lead and executive director for space exploration at TII, Dr. Anton Ivanov, said at the press conference. About 60% of the workforce is Emirati, and the project drew on more than 25 UAE-based suppliers. If it succeeds, Justitia would be only the seventh asteroid in history to be reached on the surface by a probe, according to TII.

How local is “local”? The probe itself was built entirely in the UAE, and officials say about 80% of the wider mission's work is now done at home — a step up from the Hope Mars probe. The mission paves the way for them to get closer to having full missions developed and executed here in the UAE, officials said.

Partnerships remain part of the model, but localization is still at the forefront. TII tapped Australia's Hex20 to help develop the MBR Explorer bus, and the company has since opened an office in the UAE. That's the kind of foreign know-how the localization push is designed to attract. “Partnerships help us go faster,” Elias Tsoutsanis, chief researcher at the TII’s Propulsion and Space Research Center, tells EnterpriseAM.

The role of local firms and stakeholders is growing with each mission, Tsoutsanis says. He points to programs and incentives designed to bring more capability and know-how into the country, including the Space Economic Zones program, which encourages space startups to set up shop in the UAE by providing incentives like funding, express permits, and access to advanced space facilities.

The rest still happens abroad, for now. The spacecraft is being integrated at the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, which is again serving as the mission's knowledge transfer partner, as it did on Hope. The UAE also lacks domestic launch vehicles and the spaceports needed for deep-space missions, UAE Space Agency Director-General Salem Al Qubaisi told Khaleej Times previously. MBR Explorer will therefore launch from Japan aboard Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' H3 rocket and keep international partners, including the Italian Space Agency and US universities. “It's not about having everything,” Al Qubaisi said. It's about owning “sovereign things” with strategic and commercial value, he added.

One of those things is the data processing unit built into the probe. The AI-capable board interfaces with the probe's cameras and onboard computer to allow it to make decisions, given that the probe will not be receiving commands from Earth once it’s separated from the spacecraft. The DPU technology could be used for applications well beyond deep space. That includes Earth observation, where downstream analytics, imaging, and intelligence drive much of the industry's activity, Tsoutsanis says, adding that the units could also be deployed on the ground. One of the engineers who worked on the DPU also said the device could find uses in defense and monitoring, as well as in future missions.

Why it matters: That's the commercial case the UAE has been trying to make for its space spending. “Sovereign technology has to have a practical meaning,” Faisal Al Bannai, secretary-general of the Advanced Technology Research Council, said at the press conference. Al Bannai noted that while communications and remote sensing have clear commercial markets, through players like Thuraya and Space42, exploration is harder to justify to government budgets. But Tsoutsanis insists there is “commercial potential” for a technology like the DPU, while Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, chairman of the UAE Space Agency, points to other commercial applications for space exploration like remote sensing.

What’s next: The probe is undergoing final testing, including thermal cycle testing and performance tests.