PARIS (AP) — Due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Europe will not attempt this year to send its first probe to Mars, whose mission was to investigate whether there was ever life on the red planet.
And if cooperation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos cannot be resumed, the launch of the ExoMars probe will likely take place in 2026 or 2028, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.
Previous plans to launch the probe with Russia in September are “probably impossible, but also politically impossible,” said agency director Dr. Josef Aschbacher.
“This year there will be no launch.”
ESA had previously said that the mission was “very unlikely” because of the Russian war against Ukraine. The ESA board of directors decided to suspend cooperation with Roscosmos at a meeting in Paris this week.
“We deeply deplore the human casualties and the tragic consequences of the aggression against Ukraine,” the agency said in a statement. “While we recognize the impact on scientific exploration of space, ESA is fully aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia by its member states.”
Because of their respective orbits around the Sun, Mars is only accessible from Earth every two years. The next opportunity for launch would be in 2024. But if sanctions have not been lifted by then and cooperation allowed, that opportunity would also be lost.
Separating Russian contributions to the mission and replacing Russian components with others will take time. The probe itself, called Rosalind Franklin and equipped with a drill bit, is European with some Russian components.
In turn, the cocking platform, Kazachok, is Russian with some European instruments.
The probe would look for signs of life in depths of up to two meters below the Martian surface, where they would be well preserved if they exist.
The ExoMars mission was postponed since 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic and the need for further testing with the spacecraft.
The launch was to take place with a Russian Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan in September and descend on the red planet about nine months later.
The NASA robot Perseverance, which arrived in February 2021, and the Chinese robot Zhurong, named after the Chinese god of fire, are already on Mars.
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