Skip to main content

How Europe’s ExoMars rover plans to get to Mars without Russia

Space missions get scuppered for all kinds of reasons, from engineering problems to budget issues. But the ExoMars mission, Europe and Russia’s joint plan to send a rover to Mars, faced a complicated political and ethical issue when Russia invaded Ukraine last year. The European Space Agency (ESA) had been working with the Russian space agency Roscomos on the mission but this partnership was soon suspended over what ESA called the “human casualties and tragic consequences of the aggression towards Ukraine.”

Without Roscosmos, the Rosalind Franklin rover was left without a launcher and it was not clear whether the rover would be able to launch at all. But loath to give up on the project, ESA decided it would build its own lander and get the rover to Mars hopefully by 2030. This week, ESA shared more information about the plans for the mission and how it is continuing with testing for the rover.

Related Videos
ESA’s Rosalind Franklin twin rover is back on its wheels and drilled down 1.7 metres into a martian-like ground in Italy – about 25 times deeper than any other rover has ever attempted on Mars. The test rover, known as Amalia, also collected samples for analysis under the watchful eye of European science teams.
ESA’s Rosalind Franklin twin rover is back on its wheels and drilled down 1.7 meters into a martian-like ground in Italy – about 25 times deeper than any other rover has ever attempted on Mars. The test rover, known as Amalia, also collected samples for analysis under the watchful eye of European science teams. ESA – S. Corvaja

While ESA estimates it will take at least three to four years to build a new lander, the rover itself has been close to ready for a long time. It was originally scheduled for launch in 2020 but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, then for launch in 2022 which was delayed due to the invasion of Ukraine. Now engineers are continuing to test the rover along with its twin, Amalia, recently putting it through a drilling test in a simulated martian environment.

The rover will dig nearly 6 feet down into the Martian surface, which is 25 times deeper than previous Mars missions have gone, to look for subsurface features like water ice. The recent tests used layers of soft silica, sand, and volcanic soil to simulate the martian soil and test whether the drill could be used to collect samples.

The twin rover was able to take a sample, use its imager to take close-up photos of the sample, and crush the sample into powder for scientific analysis. This test shows that the rover itself is looking in good shape, but the whole process of designing and building a lander for the rover still needs to be addressed.

In a video, ESA staff talk about the decision to suspend the mission and how they are adjusting to the new plan. “The war in Ukraine has had a massive impact on our work,” Pietro Baglioni, ExoMars Rover Manager, said in the video. “We were ready to go with the launch campaign for ExoMars, and we had all of a sudden to stop and to reconsider our plans.”

“For the team, it has been very difficult to digest this decision because they’ve been working very hard in the last years,” Baglioni went on. “It was indeed difficult also from a human perspective. But of course, they understand the political implications so they managed to reset.”

Editors' Recommendations

Mars Curiosity rover finds evidence of water where it was expected to be dry
Curiosity Rover

The key to understanding whether Mars was ever habitable is water. For life as we know it to thrive, liquid water needs to be present -- and we know that even though it is now dry, there was once liquid water on the surface of Mars. However, the history of water on Mars is complex, and scientists are still debating exactly how long water was present there and when the planet dried up.

And it's about to get more complex. Recently, the Curiosity rover has made an intriguing discovery suggesting that water was once present in an area that scientists had thought would be dry.

Read more
Ingenuity helicopter helps researchers learn about dust on Mars
The Ingenuity helicopter is pictured on the surface of Mars.

One of the big challenges of Mars exploration is something very small: dust. Fine dust covers much of the martian surface, and high winds and low gravity mean the dust is easily whipped up off the surface, covering solar panels and gumming up components. The Ingenuity helicopter has had its own problems with dust on its solar panels, limiting the amount of power it could draw from the sun.

Now, researchers have used data from Ingenuity to understand more about how dust moves in the martian air, learning about the dynamics of dust, which could help future missions deal with this ongoing problem.

Read more
NASA Mars rover has discovered an alien rock
A meteorite discovered on Mars in 2023.

While NASA’s newer Perseverance rover usually gets all the headlines, 11-year-old Curiosity continues to trundle across the surface of Mars in search of interesting discoveries. And it’s just made one.

Ashley Stroupe, mission operations engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is overseeing the Curiosity mission, said on JPL’s website last month that the rover had happened upon a 1-foot-wide rock that “seems to have come from elsewhere.”

Read more