The ambitious Russian-European mission ExoMars 2020, which planned to send a robot this summer to the red planet, has been postponed to 2022. Technical difficulties and the global epidemic of coronavirus are invoked.
According to a joint press release from the Russian agency Roskosmos and the European Space Agency (ESA), the departure to Mars of this robot is now scheduled for August-September 2022.
The heads of the two space agencies concluded after a meeting that ‘further testing of the spacecraft with the final components and software is necessary’. They also ‘had to recognize that the final phase of ExoMars is compromised by the general worsening of the epidemic (of Covid-19) in European countries’.
Roskomos chief Dmitri Rogozin said the decision was ‘difficult but well thought out’. “It is mainly motivated by the need to maximize the robustness of all ExoMars systems and by the circumstances” related to the epidemic, he said, quoted in the statement.
The situation in Europe ‘has practically prevented our experts from visiting partner industries,’ he explained.
‘No margin for error’
ESA chief Jan Wörner said he wanted ‘to be 100% sure of a successful mission’. ‘We cannot accept any margin for error. More checks will ensure a safe journey and the best scientific results on Mars, ‘he said.
This ambitious and delicate mission plans to send a mobile robot to Mars to drill on Martian soil and try to find signs of past life on the red planet.
Russia supplies the launcher, the descent module (with European elements including parachutes) and the landing platform for ExoMars. The robot, called Rosalind Franklin, is European. It includes a drill and a miniature research laboratory.
Parachute problems
A test carried out in early August on the largest of the four parachutes responsible for allowing the smooth arrival of the robot and the landing module on the Martian surface had ended in failure.
Another test carried out at the end of May on all four parachutes (two main and two small which are used to deploy the large) had suffered the same fate.
Roskosmos and ESA said Thursday, ‘The last dynamic extraction tests for ExoMars parachutes have been successfully carried out at the Nasa laboratory’ and ‘the main parachutes are ready for the last two high altitude fall tests in March in Oregon, United States’.
“All the necessary flight equipment has been integrated” into the Russian Proton rocket and the robot has “recently passed the last tests in France”, added the two agencies.
Tenuous atmosphere
Mars has a very tenuous atmosphere and the undercarriage braking system must be very efficient. So far the United States is the only country that has successfully operated robots on Mars.
In October 2016, as part of the first part of the ExoMars mission, Europe had failed in its attempt to land a landing demonstrator named Schiaparelli.
Following contradictory information having misled the on-board software, the spacecraft had crashed on the surface of the red planet after a free fall at high speed. In contrast, the European TGO probe had been successfully placed into orbit.
Swiss technology
“ExoMars will be the first mission to look for signs of life at depths of up to two meters below the Martian surface, where biological life signatures can be particularly well preserved,” said Roskosmos and ESA.
The mission was to be launched by a Russian Proton rocket between July 25 and August 13, 2020, with a landing on Mars scheduled for March 2021.
The European rover includes technologies developed in part by Swiss research institutions. These include a camera rock analysis system called CLUPI (Close-Up Imager). The Swiss Space Office, the Space-X Space Exploration Institute in Neuchâtel and the Bern Natural History Museum are involved.
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