The stars haven’t aligned for ExoMars, Europe’s first Mars rover, but scientists still think the aging vehicle could play a big role in answering one of the biggest questions in the exploration of Mars Has there ever been life on the Red Planet?
European Space Agency (ESA) exomars The Rosalind Franklin rover is probably the most high-profile space industry casualty Russian war in Ukraine, Originally slated to launch in 2018, the rover was finally announced as ready to go (after several delays) for 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 these plans.
esa officially finished cooperation On the ExoMars mission with Russia in July, conceived in 2004, leaving the rover, once again in limbo, and more importantly, without a landing platform to put it on the surface. Mars. (That landing platform was built by Russia, which joined the ExoMars program in 2012 after the return of the original partner, NASA, in 2012.)
ESA has yet to decide on the fate of the mission. With $1.3 billion already spent on the program, it will have to choose between dismantling the rover entirely or forking out another substantial sum to replace the Russian bits.
related: A Brief History of the Mars Mission
In the case of the latter option, the most optimistic estimates see the ExoMars rover abandoning Earth in 2028. For many European scientists, scrapping the mission should not be an option, and not just because of the investment. even though NASA’s Perseverance blowing it away sample collection While goals, and plans for a mission that will bring those samples to Earth, are already underway, the aging ExoMars rover could contribute to our understanding of Mars, he says. And some of those questions can’t, in fact, be answered with stellar convincing.
,[The rover’s instruments] “It’s going to get a little old,” John Bridges, a professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester in the UK, told SPACE.com. But as long as maintenance can be done, it doesn’t really bother me too much that we’re not using the most cutting edge technology. Even if we’re going by bicycle instead of the newest car, it doesn’t matter, as long as we get there.”
drill promise
The Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover’s greatest strength and scientific promise is its 6.6-foot (2 m) drill, which, according to some astrologers, may be more likely to find traces of it. Past or Present Martian Life Tight persistence than on Mars.
“Fragments of rock collected by persistence are from the immediate surface [of Mars]Susan Schwenzer, an astrophysicist 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 this Mars sample return mission, told SPACE.com. “And this immediate surface is bombarded by galactic cosmic raysand UV rays [from the sun]that destroy organic matter.”
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 Martian rocks.
,[The effects of the radiation] decrease rapidly, so the first centimeter [inches] are the worst hits,” Schwenzer said.
That doesn’t mean that persistence can’t find traces of life, just that detecting organic molecules in burnt surface layers may require more challenging scientific analysis, Schwenzer said.
“The advantage of return samples is that we’ll have them over here in our labs,” Schwenzer said. “If we find something that we can’t answer with the tools we have, we can wait for the right technology to develop. It took until the late 1990s to find water. Apollo samples because they didn’t have the right equipment at the time.”
The deep excavations that were done for the ExoMars rover actually help scientists understand the change in hardness rocks and the changes caused by bombardment by radiation.
,[The ExoMars rover] This will help us understand how organics do not degrade or degrade at depth and are preserved in deeper layers,” Schwenzer said.
Europe’s wrong turn
Bridges agrees with Schwenzer. But there are other reasons why continuing to ExoMars should be the only option on the table, he thinks. A generation of European scientists have linked their careers with this mission, which will have always been a moonlight for Europe since its inception in 2004.
“When we started ExoMars in 2004, it was far from the capabilities [of ESA and the European space industry] To do that,” Bridges said. “So we told the Americans to take it off and when the Americans pulled out, the ESA just looked around, and the Russians put their hands up, and it’s done.”
Bridges has described the partnership with Russia, which was hastily put down by the ESA leadership under General Director Jean-Jacques Dourdain in 2012, as “a strategic mistake”.
“I think we should have hit the pause button at that time and have a tough discussion in the European communities about what we are going to do,” he said.
At that time, Ukraine was still two years away from the start of the conflict, but Russia was already guilty of provoking the bloody war in georgia (opens in new tab), Its actions in the Caucasian country were heavily ignored by the international community at the time.
“There is disappointment and disappointment, because so much work has gone into ExoMars,” Bridges said. “Tools, science team. But we should probably still live with it and try and recoup all that scientific investment, not walk away from it in despair.”
Call to confirm life on Mars
Schwenzer says that to give a final answer to the big question, whether there has ever been life on Mars, scientists will want to review as much data as possible.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Schweinzer quoted the famous astrologer Carl Sagan, “We just can’t find a molecule that’s usually produced by life on Earth and claim that we found life on Mars. We can’t claim that unless we can completely exclude That something else might have made that molecule. And in order to do that, we’re going to need all the information we can get, not just from one mission.”
ExoMars’ Estimated Landing Site oxia plainAn ancient clay-rich basin near Mars’ northern tropics was carefully selected by a pan-European scientific consortium because it provided the best conditions for retaining traces of life.
Bridges said the basin, formed about 4 billion years ago, contains fine-grained sediments, with a catchment area of thousands of miles where water was stored in the past.
“It’s a very different area to 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 small part of the surface of Mars and we shouldn’t fall into the trap of assuming that We’ve seen that, done that.”
Fall back
The ExoMars puzzle, Bridges suggests, exposes weaknesses in ESA’s strategy, and undermines the agency’s aspiration to become the world-class player it wants to be.
The ESA, a partnership of 22 European member states, was beaten to the surface of Mars by China, which only revealed its plans for zurong Rover in 2014. Chinese lander including the famous Yutu Rover, dominated the exploration of the Moon over the past decade. Meanwhile, Japan’s space agency JAXA has built up a legacy of Returning samples from asteroids.
“ESA have the problem that they can be left flapping a bit in the wind,” Bridges said. “If external factors change, they don’t have enough size or strength to withstand being buffeted about. Part of it is that they haven’t really decided what their strategy is, they What they really want to do. JAXA or the National Space Administration of China, who know exactly what they want to do and they 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. Among the possibilities is the return of the original partner NASA, which could land the rover using its proven technologies, Bridges said, but with substantial financial contributions from ESA.
NASA’s recent decision European Mars Sample Return Scrap Fetch Rover And replace it with helicopters built by NASA, which may provide an incentive to live with troubled exoMars.
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