MILTON KEYNES, UK – European aerospace giant Airbus has been testing its Mars Sample Fetch Rover in simulated Martian terrain at a quarry near London for the past few weeks in hopes the technology, which is no longer legal for Mars, will be tested is getting a second chance on a future moon mission.
The rover was originally intended to collect samples cached by NASA Perseverance Mars Rover for a return to Earth in the early 2030s. But NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), jointly running the Mars sample return campaign, exited the fetch rover Concept in July of this year to benefit a pair of small NASA helicopters.
The cancellation was a second Mars Rover-related setback for Airbus and the entire European space industry this year after the launch of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover, scheduled to take place in September canceled due to Russia’s involvement with the project.
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s first year on Mars
The Fetch rover, which Airbus officials say can travel up to twice as fast as Perseverance, features a unique wheel design inspired by the Apollo era lunar rover. The wheels are encased in metal mesh protective tires that conform to the surface and allow the rover to negotiate obstacles more efficiently.
During the latest tests at the quarry near Milton Keynes, a town about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of London, Airbus engineers put the autonomous navigation system through its paces, which the rover can use to plan its route independently and safely avoid obstacles.
“We were very happy with the performance on this fake Mars [environment]’ Warren Hamilton, a guidance, navigation and control systems architect on the Sample Fetch Rover project at Airbus, told Space.com Full of Interesting Obstacles.”
The biggest challenge to making the technology work, according to Hamilton, is the need to use hardened, space-ready computers that fall short of the current state of the art. Instead of driving around like an autonomous car, the rover stops every few meters to assess the terrain before beginning the next leg of its journey.
“The space-faring computers are very slow, kind of a technology from the 1990s,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton admitted the team was surprised by the decision to replace the fetch rover with two helicopters, but hopes the technology will get another chance on one of NASA’s upcoming lunar exploration missions Artemis program.
“The technology we have developed and are developing for the navigation system for obstacle avoidance and autonomous traversal is truly applicable to any environment,” Hamilton said. “We took it to a quarry and it worked perfectly here.”
Hamilton’s colleague Ben Dobke, an integrated breadboard manager on the Mars fetch rover project at Airbus, said it is possible to switch to the navigation system moon Without too many difficulties, the rover design itself would require a significant engineering overhaul.
“Temperature extremes are more extreme on the moon,” Dobke told Space.com. “Mars has a typical day like Earth, about 24 hours, but the Moon has a 14-day shadow. Building a system that can operate on the moon can therefore be challenging. We will examine that in future studies.”
Meanwhile, ESA, which funded the development of the Mars Sample Fetch rover, is working to outline the future of the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin. the ExoMars Rover, built to search for traces of life below the surface of the red planet with a 6.6-foot (2-meter) drill bit, was scheduled to launch last month from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch was scrapped after the ESA first suspended and then ended cooperation with Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
ESA hopes to bring the ExoMars rover to Mars with the help of NASA later this decade. A final decision on the project will be made later this year. Proceeding with ExoMars will require significant investment from the European Space Agency and its member states, on top of the €1.3 billion already spent on the program. In addition to providing the launch vehicle, Russia funded and built the rover’s landing platform, which will have to be made from scratch.
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