The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed the suspension of the Russian-European ExoMars mission and is looking for alternatives for the launch of its next missions, especially to Mars.
ExoMars was scheduled for this year, but in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ESA, in a statement, “recognized the impossibility of maintaining the current cooperation with the (Russian space agency) Roscosmos”.
The ESA board of directors has instructed its director to conduct a rapid study to relaunch ExoMars and look for new options.
“It’s very bittersweet for all space enthusiasts,” the agency’s head, Dmitri Rogozin, said on Telegram.
At the same time, Rogozin expressed optimism that “in a few years” Russia will be able to carry out this mission alone.
“Yes, it will take a few years (…) but we will be able to carry out this research mission on our own from the new launch site at Vostochny Cosmodrome,” he said.
A mission taken by incidents
ExoMars was scheduled to launch a Mars-bound rover in September, with the help of a Russian launcher and landing structure.
The launches of several ESA missions used, until now, the Russian launcher Soyouz from the European spaceport of Kourou, in French Guiana.
Roscosmos condemned the European sanctions imposed in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suspending launches with Soyouz in the port of Kourou and recalling its team of hundreds of engineers and technicians.
Initially scheduled for 2020, the launch of ExoMars was postponed, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, to September 2022.
The ESA rover Rosalind Franklin was to be transported by a Proton rocket from Baïkanour in Kazakhstan and land on Mars with the help of the Russian Kazatchok lander.
Now, the space expedition is more than compromised because of a launch window towards the red planet that opens every two years.
Cooperation with US NASA “is an option,” said ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher.
All other ESA missions that are based on the use of the Russian Proton launcher have also been suspended. These include two satellites for the European positioning constellation Galileo, the Euclid science mission and the European-Japanese Earth observation mission EarthCARE.
The situation is difficult because one of the alternatives to replace Soyouz, the Ariane 6 rocket, has a full agenda.
That rocket has yet to put a French military observation satellite, CSO-3, into orbit, and the mission will be delayed by a year because of the cancellation of Russian services.
The greatest symbol of space cooperation with Russia, dating back to the 1990s when the Soviet Union fell, remains the International Space Station (ISS).
The ISS basically has two segments, one American and one Russian.
The Roscosmos boss recently warned of the effect of sanctions on his own plans. The Progress spacecraft, for example, serves to keep the ISS in its orbit.
Aschbacher ruled out a security impact on the ISS on Thursday.
“Operations are stable and secure,” he said.
