Russians were called to save the European Mars rover
ExoMars Rover / Artist View / Image: ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) has issued a formal invitation to Russia to join the NASA-ESA Mars exploration program to save the project.
As reported by spacenews.com - "The agency is asking for a definitive response from Moscow by late January, at which point ESA will decide whether to maintain its ExoMars program as a two-launch effort with Russia as a new partner alongside NASA, or reduce it to a single launch, with NASA, of a jointly built Mars rover in 2018. The appeal to Russia, which came in the form of a letter to the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, is likely ESA’s only hope of saving the full U.S.-European Mars exploration project, which Europe calls ExoMars, Dordain said in an interview"
The ExoMars project is a complex mission to the Red Planet has first appeared in the early 2000s and was regarded as an exclusively European project. The initial estimated cost of the mission was 650 million euros. Originally, ESA planned to send to Mars an orbiter, a data transmission relay, a fixed probe and a rover. Working together, all the components of the mission would provide the most complete picture of the atmosphere and terrestrial geophysics conditions of planet Mars.
However, by the end of 2008, the situation for ESA has changed. The agency was no longer happy about the specifications of already approved rover, and there were serious reasons for this: By this time the American rover "Phoenix" has already found water on Mars and a pair of NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, launched in 2003, have already worked on Mars for nearly five years instead of the planned one and a half months. So the European rover, despite the powerful drill on board, at this time was very much like the American counterparts and the scientific value of the mission was called into question.
To save the mission, the European Space Agency urgently decided to improve the rover and the price of the project has grown to a billion euros. So to save money it was decided to abandon a separate ESA-provided telecommunications orbiter and entry-descent-landing system. Even after it was announced that the agency will seek cooperation with Roskosmos and NASA, the cost of the project equipment for many participants, (the policy of the European Space Agency jointly determined by the participating countries) seemed to be prohibitive.
ESA would like Russia to be involved in ExoMars as a full participant along with NASA. ESA expects that the Russian role would include provision of experiments. ESA fully aware that if Russia accepts the invitation they most likelly put up some specific conditions like taking over some instrumentation work or having their own researchers involved into the project, but at this stage it looks like Russians are the only hope for ESA to save the project.
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Related News:
Spacenews.com, 12 Oct 2011, ESA Formally Invites Roscosmos To Join ExoMars Mission as Full-fledged Partner
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