History lures the United Arab Emirates as it seeks to place a probe around Mars on Tuesday.
UAE Mars mission
Currently moving at over 120,000 km / h (75,000 mph), braking motors must fire for 27 minutes to ensure they are caught by the planet's gravity.
The success will enable Hope to begin her mission to study the Martian climate.
"We are entering a very critical stage," said project manager Imran Sharaf. “It is basically a stage that determines whether or not we will reach Mars; whether or not we will be able to conduct our science.
He told BBC News: "If we go very slowly, we are crashing on Mars, and if we go too fast, we are bypassing Mars."
Hope is the first of three missions to reach the Red Planet this month. On Wednesday, the Chinese orbiter Tianwen-1 will also try to put it into orbit, while the Americans will attend on the 18th with another large vehicle.
• NASA rover presses Mars
• "Lift" for the largest telescope in the world
• The launch of a world record number of satellites
For Hope, everything rides in Tuesday's insertion into orbit maneuver. In the past two months, engineers have reduced the spacecraft's trajectory so that it reaches the planet at exactly the right moment in place and time to start burning the braking.
Mission Control at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) in Dubai will have some data flowing back into the performance of Hope engines, but there is nothing anyone can do to intervene if something goes wrong.
Mars and Earth are currently 190 million kilometers separated, which means it will take a full 11 minutes to reach the probe - a very long time to make a difference. Hope must rely on independence to complete the gambit.
"It's definitely going to be nerve-wracking," said payment engineer Aisha Sharafi. "Just thinking about it gives me chills." "But we have a malfunction protection system in place that can compensate for any problems that might occur during incineration, so I think we're well positioned for a successful Mars blocking introduction."
The signal to confirm that braking has started on the ground should be received after 19:40 GMT (15:40 GMT). This will come on NASA's Deep Space Network radio dishes.
Hope carries 800 kilograms of fuel. About half of this mass will be consumed by the six engines participating in the 27-minute maneuver.
Shortly after the engines have stopped, the spacecraft will disappear behind Mars as its trajectory curves in the initial planned orbit. Once again, there will be a worrying wait at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center while the team hangs on NASA's dish grid to get the hop signal back.
If Tuesday's effort succeeds, it will be rewarded with some great science in the coming months.
Hope can be described as a kind of weather or climate satellite of Mars.
More specifically, you'll study how energy moves through the atmosphere - from the bottom up, at all times of the day, and during all seasons of the year.
It will track features like rising dust that greatly affect the temperature of the Martian atmosphere.
It will also look at what happens to the behavior of neutral atoms of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere. There is no doubt that these atoms play an important role in the ongoing erosion of Mars' atmosphere due to energetic particles streaming away from the sun.
This plays a role in the story of why the planet now lost most of the water that was clearly there early in its history.
To collect her observations, Hope will operate a subtropical orbit standing further from the planet at a distance of 22,000 km to 44,000 km.
This means that on a routine basis we will get amazing pictures of the entire red planet.
"Any image we got of Mars would be creative, but I can't imagine how it would feel when you get the first full disk image of Mars, once we enter orbit," said Sarah Al Amiri, the UAE minister. State of advanced technology and head of the Emirates Space Agency.
"Also for me, it's about cutting scientific data and our science team starts analyzing it and finding artifacts that hadn't been previously discovered."
The excitement across the country is palpable. The buildings are lit red. The United Arab Emirates relies on this mission as an inspiration for its youth, and Arab youth in general, to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects in schools and higher education levels.
The mission began six years ago to bear fruit at the time of the golden jubilee of the United Arab Emirates (the union was established on December 2, 1971). After recently (2009) satellites began flying over Earth, the nation did not have the full skill set for launching an interplanetary mission.
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