ABU DHABI, UAE, Oct. 5, 2026 - The United Arab Emirates has finished building its asteroid probe, scientists and engineers announced on 1 October,^[1] and on 5 October the country said the MBR Explorer will launch in March 2028.^[2] Scientific American reports that the spacecraft will visit seven main-belt asteroids between Mars and Jupiter^[3] and reach its final target, 269 Justitia, in 2034, releasing a lander after seven months in orbit.^[4] Nature describes the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt as observing six asteroids with cameras and spectrometers, with arrival at Justitia in 2035.^[5] Elias Tsoutsanis of the Technology Innovation Institute said Justitia's unusual red colour suggests it holds material from the outer solar system.^[6] The UAE already placed a probe in orbit around Mars in 2021.^[7] A study published this year in Nature Communications offers a new way to estimate how strong an asteroid's surface is, using only the size and shape of its grains.^[8] Applied to Bennu, with cohesive forces measured in the samples NASA's OSIRIS-REx returned in 2023, it predicts a surface strength below 1 pascal.^[9] Strength values like these feed the impact simulations behind asteroid deflection, which has been tested only once, when NASA's DART spacecraft struck Dimorphos in 2022.^[10] Further out, researchers combined Hubble and Webb observations to analyse the composition of 27 objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.^[11] Closer to home, the large asteroid 4 Vesta made its closest approach to Earth on 9 October, at 221.4 million km.^[12] And the Caribbean Astronomy Society identified a recently observed meteor as an Orionid, a grain of debris shed by Halley's Comet.^[13] Impact Insight. Most asteroids orbit in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and many small ones are thought to be loose rubble piles held together mostly by their own weak gravity. That makes this directly relevant to planetary defense: a deflection attempt has to push an asteroid without simply scattering it, and missions and studies that measure asteroid strength supply the numbers those plans depend on.