 will send its Rosalind Franklin spacecraft to Mars. The rover is part of the ExoMars program.){kind=link}
The European Space Agency (ESA) aims to send its rover, Rosalind Franklin, to Mars. The rover is an integral part of the ExoMars program.
When the European Space Agency (ESA) officially announced the creation of its Rosalind Franklin rover in 2019, no one expected it to be able to travel to Mars before 2028. Surprisingly, the change in plans is related to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The suspension of part of the ExoMars program was not caused by technical issues that occurred at an early stage, but by the full-scale war Russia waged against Ukraine. At one point, ESA engineers struggled to select parachutes to slow down the rover, weighing over 300 kg, during its landing on Mars, and there were also issues with the proper functioning of solar panels and cables. However, these problems were resolved before the war began. The main issue lay in the fact that the European Space Agency collaborated with the Russian space agency Roscosmos in this program.
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Briefly about the Rosalind Franklin rover
The rover is named after the prominent chemist and crystallographer of the 20th century, Rosalind Franklin, whose work was crucial for the discovery of DNA and RNA. This name is highly fitting for a mission that will search for evidence of life on Mars. Among other instruments, Rosalind Franklin will have the Mars Organics Molecular Analyzer for conducting highly sensitive searches and determining the characteristics of organics on the surface. The rover will also be equipped with equipment for deep drilling to a depth of up to 2 meters (6 feet).
The rover and the landing module accompanying it are not ESA’s first attempt at Mars missions. They constitute the second phase of the ExoMars mission, which began with the Trace Gas Orbiter launched in 2016 and continues to operate on Mars to this day.
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Rosalind Franklin rover is the second part of the ExoMars program
The first element of the ExoMars program is the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2016. This mission, aimed at studying processes in Mars’ atmosphere, is still ongoing and has been highly successful. The European Space Agency (ESA) has been fortunate with its orbital probes. Sent to Mars in 2003, the Mars Express probe has been providing incredible 2D and 3D images of the planet for over two decades. In October 2023, it completed its 25,000th orbit around the planet.
The launch of the Rosalind Franklin rover is highly significant for scientists and engineers at NASA. Previous landers, such as the Beagle lander accompanying Mars Express and the Schiaparelli lander accompanying TGO, crashed on the planet’s surface. The success of Rosalind Franklin will likely overshadow the memory of all previous failures.
Initially, the Rosalind Franklin rover, which was once a joint project between ESA and Roscosmos, was supposed to be launched in 2020, but four months before that date, the launch was postponed to 2022. And as the next launch window approached, war broke out in Ukraine.
2022 – ESA terminates the contract with Roscosmos
Within a few dozen hours of the start of the war in February 2022, ESA decided to terminate its cooperation with Roscosmos. In July 2022, the termination of the contract was officially announced, making it impossible to launch the mission in the near future.
This decision, both logistically and scientifically, proved to be very painful for the Rosalind Franklin rover project, which had been in development for 12 years. Today, one might question the wisdom of the decision-makers. There are suspicions, based on leaked correspondence within ESA at a critical moment, that the war was merely a catalyst rather than the primary reason for terminating the cooperation with Roscosmos.
NASA, in turn, has not ceased cooperation with the Russian agency on the International Space Station. However, it’s important to remember that docking modules have already been launched—Soyuz and Progress have flown and continue to fly, and a significant portion of the station consists of Russian modules.
In February 2022, the Rosalind Franklin rover had not yet reached the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and the final assembly of the launch platform had not begun, although it was supposed to. Perhaps then the fate of the European rover would have turned out very differently. The question remains, what would its fate have been?
Interestingly, ESA not only built the Rosalind Franklin rover but also its replica, Amalia, for platform testing. NASA’s rovers also often have similar duplicate structures.
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What has ESA lost as a result of Russia’s attack on Ukraine?
Roscosmos was supposed to provide the Proton rocket for the program, as well as the Kazachok landing module, to serve as a stationary platform for atmospheric research. While the ESA rover is capable of operating autonomously on the surface of Mars, without the landing module, it wouldn’t have been able to initiate planet exploration. This decision was also painful for the Polish branch of SENER, which prepared the component responsible for charging the rover’s batteries after landing, then detaching from the rover when it begins surface exploration independently. This component was meant to work with both ESA equipment and that used in the landing module.
Finding a replacement rocket is not easy, but it’s possible. However, building a landing module from scratch is a different story; it would require at least 3-4 years of intensive work. Therefore, the ready-to-go Rosalind Franklin rover was put into storage awaiting news, while work on the project itself was suspended.
As a result, ESA not only had to cancel the launch of the rover planned for the fall of 2022 but also reconsider its options. NASA, which initially participated in the ExoMars mission, withdrew from it in 2012, but now may intervene again to help push the mission forward. The U.S. agency requested $30 million to support the mission in the 2024 fiscal year, but agencies are still calculating the long-term costs.
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2024 – ESA continues work on the ExoMars rover project
The landing site for the Rosalind Franklin rover mission has been identified since 2018. It’s the Oxia Planum plain—a remnant of a wet period in Mars’ history, rich in clay minerals.
Mission planning is aided by the most accurate geological map of the Red Planet. It has been created over the past four years based on data from the ESA’s TGO rover and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter multifunctional interplanetary station.
Now that ESA knows precisely where the Rosalind Franklin rover project should be headed, another incentive is needed—raising funds for the company that will do what was once the Russians’ task. On April 9, 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it had decided to allocate 500 million euros to complete the rover project. The task of preparing the landing module will be carried out by a team led by the European consortium Thales Alenia Space. Additionally, a landing module will be constructed to deliver Rosalind Franklin to the surface of Mars.
ESA hopes that NASA will provide engine components to help the landing module reach the surface of Mars, and NASA has stated its readiness to assist.
“The biggest challenge lies in ensuring that we can obtain and integrate the components coming from the USA into the landing module quickly enough to properly test the entire spacecraft. There are new components that we need to learn to work with, and it takes time to master them and ensure that the software, avionics, and components are functioning properly,” ESA says.
However, there is a risk that delays could prove costly in another sense: a prime example is the Galileo mission to Jupiter, which NASA had to postpone for three years. As a result of prolonged storage, the spacecraft’s main antenna failed to fully deploy after launch, limiting the amount of data it could transmit back home. Creative problem-solving by scientists saved the mission. Only time will tell whether delays in ExoMars will affect the rover mission.
But ESA remains hopeful that NASA will indeed provide the project with the necessary plutonium heaters for the flight engines that support aerodynamic braking and ensure the rocket launch (a decision has not yet been made) from Florida. The start of the mission this time is planned for the fourth quarter of 2028. The launch window will provide a two-year journey to Mars with a landing in 2030. Landing on the Red Planet is what excites many observers of the ExoMars program, as ESA has attempted it twice before, both times unsuccessfully.
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Why ESA’s Mars rover is still a very important project
Every mission related to Mars is still a first of its kind. When the Rosalind Franklin rover begins its journey, it will become part of the ESA project, which has been ongoing for over two decades. Therefore, this project may seem outdated, but it’s important to remember that breakthroughs in solar system exploration technology don’t happen so frequently.
The challenge with rovers lies in Mars’ unfriendly surface, including the fine soil where wheels can sink, making it difficult to maneuver. For instance, NASA’s Spirit rover (operational from 2004 to 2011) ended its mission on Mars after getting stuck in a sand trap. It couldn’t free itself and became immobilized in a position that hindered it from recharging its battery. ESA must consider such possibilities, which is why the Rosalind Franklin rover is equipped with a dual propulsion system. By default, it rolls on six wheels, but they can also act as legs. A rover traversing Mars’ surface must navigate through many challenging situations.
Rosalind Franklin, the heaviest of solar-powered rovers, is smaller than NASA’s large rovers Curiosity and Perseverance. Although both the Drill and Perseverance have collected samples even for future generations of researchers, they can only drill to a depth of up to 10 cm.
Meanwhile, only reaching a depth of two meters will allow the exploration of soil layers where cosmic radiation is not as destructive as on the surface of Mars. The ESA rover will be able to drill to such a depth. This creates the possibility of accomplishing what even the famous InSight mission failed to do. That’s why the Rosalind Franklin mission remains special, even though it is already a veteran of waiting for a flight to Mars.
But the fact that the European Space Agency is working to get the Rosalind Franklin rover mission back on track after complex issues speaks volumes about humanity’s determination to explore Mars. Mars, which entices, which captivates. Therefore, we eagerly await the launch of the ambitious Rosalind Franklin mission by ESA.
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