The stars for Europe’s first Mars rover ExoMars aren’t aligned yet, but scientists still believe the aging vehicle may play a big role in answering one of the biggest questions in Mars exploration: Has life ever existed on the red planet?
The European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover is probably the most prominent victim of the space industry Russia’s War in Ukraine. Originally planned for 2018, the rover was finally declared (after several delays) ready for a launch in September this year Russia’s Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put an end to those plans.
ESA official ended cooperation on the ExoMars mission with Russia in July, leaving the rover conceived in 2004 again in limbo and, more importantly, without a landing pad on which to place it on the surface Mars. (This landing platform was built by Russia, which joined the ExoMars program in 2012 after the original partner, NASA, withdrew in 2012.)
ESA has yet to decide the fate of the mission. Having already spent $1.3 billion on the program, it must decide whether to scrap the rover altogether or spend another sizable sum to replace the Russian bits.
Related: A Brief History of the Mars Missions
In the case of the latter option, the most optimistic estimates assume that the ExoMars rover will take off Earth in 2028. Aborting the mission may not be an option for many European scientists, and not just because of the investment. Although NASA endurance smashed his sample collection Goals and plans for a mission that would bring these samples to Earth are already underway. The aging ExoMars rover can add a lot to our understanding of Mars, they say. And indeed, some of these questions cannot be answered by stellar Perseverance.
“[The rover’s instruments] getting a little old,” John Bridges, professor of planetary sciences at Leicester University in the UK, told Space.com. “But as long as the maintenance can be done, I don’t mind too much. We don’t use the most modern technology. Even if we go by bike instead of the latest car, it doesn’t matter as long as we get there.”
The promise of the drill
The greatest strength and scientific promise of the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin is its 2-meter drill bit, which some astrobiologists say may have a higher chance of finding traces of it past or present Martian lives on Mars as the Agile Perseverance.
“The pieces of rock that Perseverance collects come from the immediate surface [of Mars]’, Susanne Schwenzer, an astrobiologist at the Open University in the UK who is also an interdisciplinary scientist on the ExoMars mission and a member of NASA’s science teams curiosity and the Return of the Mars sample missions, said Space.com. “And that immediate surface is being bombarded by galactics cosmic raysand the UV rays [from the sun]which destroy organic materials.”
Unlike Earth, Mars has no protective magnetic field and a very thin atmosphereso there is nothing to filter out this sterilizing radiation, some of which can penetrate several meters deep into the Martian rocks.
“[The effects of the radiation] decrease exponentially, i.e. the first few centimetres [inches] are hit the hardest,” said Schwenzer.
That doesn’t mean Perseverance can’t find traces of life, just that detecting the organic molecules in the burned surface layers might require more sophisticated scientific analysis, Schwenzer added.
“The benefit of returns is that we have them here in our labs,” Schwenzer said. “If we find something that we can’t answer with the existing tools, we can wait until the right technology is developed. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that water was found in the water Apollo Samples because they didn’t have the right instrumentation back then.”
The deep excavations the ExoMars rover was built for may actually help scientists understand the rocks of Perseverance and the changes they have suffered as a result of radiation bombardment.
“[The ExoMars rover] will help us understand how the organic matter does or does not degrade with depth and is preserved in deeper layers,” Schwenzer said.
Europe’s wrong turn
Bridges agrees with Schwenzer. But there are other reasons why continuing ExoMars should be the only option on the table, he thinks. A generation of European scientists has linked their careers to what may always have been a bit of a moonshot for Europe since their inception in 2004.
“When we started ExoMars in 2004, it was way off the mark [of ESA and the European space industry] to do it,” Bridges said. “So we got the Americans to land it and when the Americans left, ESA just looked around and the Russians put their hand up and it was done.”
Bridges describes the partnership with Russia hastily set up by ESA management under Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain in 2012 as a “strategic mistake”.
“I think we should have hit the pause button back then and had a harder discussion in the European communities about what we were going to do,” he said.
At that time, the start of the conflict in Ukraine was two years away, but Russia was already guilty of fomenting a bloodbath War in Georgia (opens in new tab); Their actions in the Caucasian country were largely overlooked by the international community at the time.
“There’s frustration and disappointment because so much work has gone into ExoMars,” Bridges said. “The instruments, the science teams. But we should probably stick with it anyway and try to recoup all that science investment, not just throw up our hands in disappointment and walk away from it.”
The call to confirm life on Mars
Schwenzer adds that scientists want to review as much data as possible to provide the ultimate answer to the big question of whether life ever existed on Mars.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Schwenzer said, citing a famous astrobiologist Karl Sagan. “We can’t just find a molecule that life on Earth normally produces and claim we found life on Mars. We cannot make that claim unless we can absolutely rule out that anything else could have made this molecule. We would need all the information we can get, not just from one mission.”
The planned landing site of ExoMars in Oxia planuman ancient argillaceous basin near the tropic of Mars, was carefully selected by a pan-European scientific consortium as offering the best conditions to host traces of life.
Formed about 4 billion years ago, the basin, covered in fine-grained sediments, has a catchment area thousands of kilometers long, Bridges said, where water used to accumulate.
“It is a completely different area than the Jezero crater [where Perseverance roams]’ Bridges said. “But just because we’ve seen one doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeing the other. We’ve still only explored a tiny fraction of the surface of Mars, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap of assuming we saw that, did that.”
falling behind
The ExoMars mystery, Bridges says, highlights weaknesses in ESA’s strategy and undermines the agency’s claim to be the world-class player it aspires to be.
ESA, a partnership of 22 European member states, was slammed onto the surface of Mars by China, which only revealed its plans for Mars Zhurong Rover in 2014. Chinese landers, including the famous one Yutu Rover, have dominated lunar exploration for the past decade. Japan’s space agency JAXA has now built a legacy Returning samples from asteroids.
“The problem with ESA is that they can flap a little in the wind,” Bridges said. “As external factors change, they don’t seem quite the size or strength to withstand impact. Part of that is because they haven’t really decided what their strategy is, what they really want to do versus JAXA or China’s National Space Administration who know exactly what they want to do and just go ahead and do it .”
ESA is currently evaluating options for the ExoMars rover, which it will present to its member states later this year. Possibilities include a return to original partner NASA, which could land the rover using its proven technologies, Bridges said, but with a significant financial contribution from ESA.
NASA’s latest decision Scrapping of the European Mars Trial Recovery Rover and replacing it with NASA-built helicopters could provide a nudge to stick with the troubled ExoMars.
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