It's official: Russia will no longer be part of Europe's life-hunting Mars
rover mission, which is scheduled to launch in the late 2020s.
The European Space Agency (ESA) had been developing that mission in
cooperation with its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, as part of a broader
program called ExoMars.
The original plan called for the rover, named Rosalind Franklin, to launch
atop a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, a site in Kazakhstan
that's run by Roscosmos and the Russian military. Rosalind Franklin was also
supposed to touch down with, and be deployed from, a Russian-built lander
called Kazachok.
But ESA suspended Russian participation in the rover mission after Russia
invaded Ukraine in late February. That suspension will now be upgraded to a
termination, ESA chief Josef Aschbacher just announced.
During a meeting on Tuesday (July 12), the ESA Council acknowledged "that
the circumstances which led to the suspension of the cooperation with
Roscosmos — the war in Ukraine and the resulting sanctions — continue to
prevail," Aschbacher said via Twitter Tuesday.
"As a consequence, Council mandated me to officially terminate the currently
suspended cooperation with Roscosmos on the ExoMars Rover and Surface
Platform mission. New insights on the way forward with other partners will
come at a media briefing on 20 July, details to come," he added in another
tweet.
This decision has major implications for the mission, of course. For
example, Rosalind Franklin had been scheduled to launch this September, but
the need to find a new rocket and a new landing platform now make a liftoff
before 2028 unlikely, mission team members have said. (Mars and Earth align
properly for interplanetary launches just once every 26 months.)
Many other Russian space partnerships have frayed or dissolved as a result
of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Russian rocket engines are no
longer sold to American companies, for instance, and the French company
Arianespace isn't launching satellites to orbit using Russian-built Soyuz
rockets anymore, as it once commonly did.
The ESA-Roscosmos partnership on the two-phase ExoMars program had been a
long one. The program's first phase centered on the European Trace Gas
Orbiter (TGO) and Schiaparelli landing demonstrator, which launched toward
the Red Planet atop a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur in March
2016.
TGO made it to Mars orbit safely and continues to study the planet today.
Schiaparelli, which aimed to prove out landing tech ahead of the ExoMars
rover's arrival, crashed during its touchdown attempt in October 2016.