European rover that will search for life on Mars should fly in 2028 – 04/14/2024 – Messenger Sideral

After two years of uncertainty, ESA (European Space Agency) signed a contract to complete its ExoMars Martian astrobiology mission. The Rosalind Franklin rover, intended to search for signs of past or present life on the Red Planet, is expected to depart in late 2028.

Originally, the mission should have taken off in September 2022, in a partnership between ESA and Roscosmos (Russian space agency), which would provide the landing module, radioactive heaters for the rover and the launch, to be carried out on a Proton rocket.

However, in the middle of the way there was a war. In February of that year, Russia invaded Ukraine, and ESA decided to suspend all cooperation projects with Roscosmos. The ExoMars mission went into limbo, and the rover, ready to fly, almost became a museum piece. Literally. They considered putting it in a museum.

And then NASA came to the rescue of the project, offering plutonium heaters and a launcher – yet to be defined. But the participation of the American space agency was smaller than what the Russian one was previously providing.

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place last Tuesday (9), when ESA closed the 522 million euro contract with the company Thales Alenia to serve as contractor for the new landing module for the rover, in addition to processing the assembly, integration and testing of the spacecraft. The rover, practically already assembled, will have to undergo very few adaptations to fly on the new platform, which will also feature systems developed by Airbus and a thermal shield developed by Ariane. As a result, the three main companies in the European aerospace sector will be involved in the project.

The cost of getting the mission back on track is high, but the Europeans are betting that it will be worth it: not only can the project be carried out according to plan (making the investment of 1.3 billion euros previously spent on it worthwhile) , as Europe will have developed its own system for entry, descent and landing on Mars.

To date, only two countries have carried out successful missions on Martian soil: the USA and China. Russia even managed to conduct a landing, with the Mars 3 mission, in 1971, but the module stopped working just 20 seconds after touching the ground, sending no useful data to Earth. The Schiaparelli module, developed by Europeans and Russians as a prototype of what would be used with the Rosalind Franklin rover, ended up failing in its landing attempt in 2016. The project being developed now is completely new.

If everything goes well, the ExoMars mission promises: among its various scientific instruments, the rover will have a drill capable of digging up to two meters deep in the Martian soil. If there is any biochemical evidence that life once existed on the Red Planet, it is very likely that it will be found underground, protected from the harmful effects of solar ultraviolet radiation.

This column is published on Mondays in print, in Folha Corrida.

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