The Russian invasion of Ukraine threw water on the beer of the first European attempt to operate a rover on the surface of Mars. At a meeting of its board on Thursday (17), the ESA (European Space Agency) announced the suspension of work on the ExoMars mission.
The project had already launched an orbiter and a test landing module (which failed) in 2016, but the big ambition was to bring the Rosalind Franklin rover to Martian soil. Named in honor of the researcher who helped to decipher the structure of the DNA molecule, it would aim to look for evidence of past or previous life on the red planet, at a cost of more than 1 billion euros.
Originally, it was supposed to depart in 2018. But development was delayed, which pushed the launch to 2020. And then that window was also missed, due to failures in the qualification of the parachutes. You can only launch something to Mars every 26 months, taking advantage of the proper alignment of the planets. That was it for 2022. And now everything was ready: parachute, lander, rover and launch vehicle. All that was needed was to agree with the Russians.
Partners in the project (they provided the launcher, a Proton vehicle to take off from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and built the lander, in addition to having instruments on the rover), decided to invade Ukraine and set the world on fire. Amid the exchange of threats and sanctions, ESA “recognized the present impossibility of maintaining continued cooperation with Roscosmos [corporação espacial russa] on the ExoMars rover mission launching in 2022.” Going further, “it authorized the ESA Director General to perform a rapid industrial study to better define available options for a path forward to implement the mission.”
The path is crooked. If the crisis ends in the short term and the partnership with Roscosmos is resumed, it could happen in 2024. If that doesn’t happen, the flight would be, at least, for 2026, possibly 2028. The problem is not just changing the launcher (for As a result, several other ESA projects were also hitched after Russia decided to stop Soyuz rocket operations in French Guiana). It involves intense cooperation on the lander and on the rover itself, which would somehow have to be undone and redone with another partner or with new European investments.
It wouldn’t be easy or quick either. It is worth remembering that ExoMars, before being an ESA-Roscosmos partnership, was ESA-Nasa, but the American agency dropped out in 2012 due to lack of budget availability (it had to reinvest the money in the outbursts of the James Webb Space Telescope). Since then, the situation has not improved, with the exorbitant prices of the Artemis lunar missions. Likewise, the ESA is not exactly swimming in cash and had to ask member countries for permission to spend more on ExoMars itself in 2016 after budget overruns. It won’t be a total surprise if the rover ends up becoming another casualty of the war.
This column is published on Mondays, in Folha Corrida.
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