Since arriving at Mars eight months ago, the Emirates Mars Mission has quietly begun to deliver some intriguing scientific data about the Martian atmosphere and its weather patterns.

Named "Hope," the probe is in a relatively high orbit, varying in altitude above Mars from 20,000 to 43,000 km.

For much of this year, then, the Hope probe has been training its multi-band imager, infrared spectrometer, and ultraviolet spectrometer on Mars to collect data about the planet's atmosphere and resulting weather conditions.

The project was financed by the United Arab Emirates, and the spacecraft was built in conjunction with several US-based universities, including the University of Colorado Boulder.

One goal of the mission was to share the resulting data freely, and as a result, the mission recently opened a science data portal.

Anyone can register to get access to raw images and data collected by the probe in the past, with new data sets being released every three months, without embargo.

The mission, the first Arab probe sent to Mars, is planned to operate for a minimum of two years in orbit around the red planet.

Following the success of its Mars mission, the UAE Space Agency recently announced that it is planning a still more ambitious probe that will perform a flyby of Venus in the late 2020s and then travel to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.