“So we are asking NASA if they could contribute those,” Vago says.

Similarly, ESA lacks the plutonium required for a radioisotope heating unit to keep the rover warm-something the U.S. The engines pose a particular problem because no European manufacturers offer any that are capable of landing on Mars. ESA could potentially repurpose the parts it contributed to the Kazachok lander, yet the Russian-built components-the landing legs, heat shield, descent engines, and more-would have to be developed from scratch. The laborious process of building and testing new hardware would take a 2024 launch off the table, Vago says, but a 2026 or 2028 liftoff could be a possibility. The Earth-to-Mars voyage is easiest when both planets are properly aligned, which occurs every 26 months. Time is not exactly on ESA’s side, however. But “the way things are going with the war, it’s very difficult to think this may be possible.” Given the obstacles to such a partnership reemerging, Vago says the only real viable option is for ESA to build its own lander with NASA’s assistance. Jorge Vago, the rover’s project scientist at ESA, says repartnering with Russia for a launch in 2024 would be “the most rapid and easiest way” to get to Mars, given that the rover and its landing platform are both already built. “Once we know more, we will incorporate that information into our plans.”Īlternatively (and improbably), the mission’s route could still run through Russia. In an e-mailed statement to Scientific American, NASA officials confirmed those exploratory efforts: “We have recently begun a joint assessment of options for the ExoMars mission,” they wrote.

“Our teams are working with the teams in NASA about the technical steps that need to be done,” said Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, in an interview with SpaceNews in April. One possible route for the rover reaching the Martian surface runs through the U.S., via NASA-supplied components and capabilities to augment a new ESA-built lander replacing Kazachok. ESA officials expect to formally decide whether to proceed with the mission by the time of the agency’s ministerial meeting in November 2022. But on March 17, 2022, following Russia’s widely condemned invasion of Ukraine, ESA chose to cut ties with the nation on the mission, suspending the Franklin rover indefinitely. If all had gone to plan earlier this year, the Franklin rover would have launched on a Russian Proton rocket in September before it was lowered to the surface by a Russian powered landing platform called Kazachok in June 2023. “What’s underneath the surface of Mars has huge biological implications.” (Neither Perseverance nor its near-twin the Curiosity rover are equipped to probe such depths.) “The ExoMars rover has been built purely with astrobiology in mind,” says Melissa McHugh of the University of Leicester in England, who is part of the science team for the rover’s laser spectrometer instrument. It would look deeper, too: Using a drill, it would reach as much as two meters below the surface, where evidence of life is less likely to have been erased by blasts of cosmic radiation. Whereas NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently exploring an ancient river delta inside Jezero Crater, relies on an elaborate grab-and-go Mars Sample Return program to deliver Martian material back to Earth for astrobiological analysis, the Franklin rover would perform a direct search without needing sample return. Named Rosalind Franklin after the famed English chemist who discovered the double helix structure of DNA, Europe’s rover would be a significant step forward in the hunt for life on the Red Planet.

The cursed rover may still be saved-but at what cost? European Space Agency (ESA) officials are now weighing whether to attempt a launch for a fourth time versus canceling the mission and moving on. Yet it appears increasingly likely that ExoMars will never lift off at all.

After more than 20 years of planning and development, the fully assembled rover sits awaiting launch in a facility in Turin, Italy. “It was impossible for me to speak about this mission for weeks without tears,” says Valérie Ciarletti of the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Environments, Space Observations (LATMOS) in France, who leads the rover’s subsurface radar instrument team. For members of the team hoping “the third time’s the charm,” this latest delay feels especially cruel. And now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dashed chances for a liftoff in 2022. Then the coronavirus pandemic prevented a launch in 2020. Parachute problems scuppered its initially planned launch in 2018. Europe’s long-awaited ExoMars rover-the first ever for the continent-seems to be cursed.

Ancient space program