European Mars Rover Will Drill Deep And Directly Search For Life in 2018

Mars exploration and especially the search for past and current life on the Red Planet will be further escalated in the coming years. With ancient habitability now all but proven by the epochal results of the Curiosity rover revealed two days ago, further major missions will launch to Mars in the coming years, which includes a direct successor of the NASA rover around 2020. But even before that, the European and Russian Space Agencies, ESA and Roscosmos, will launch two ExoMars programme missions in 2016 and 2018, for which they signed the formal partnership agreement today (March 14) in Paris.

The ExoMars rover, set to launch from Earth in 2018, will be constructed by ESA and will for the first time search the planet’s surface for signs of life, past and present. It will be the first Mars rover able to drill to depths of 2 m, collecting samples that have been shielded from the harsh conditions of the surface, where radiation and oxidants can destroy organic materials.

Establishing whether life ever existed on Mars is one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time and the highest scientific priority of the ExoMars programme.

The two space agencies have now agreed upon the exact and balanced sharing of responsibilities for the different mission elements. ESA will provide the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM) in 2016, and the carrier and rover in 2018. TGO will search for evidence of methane and other atmospheric gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological processes, and also serve as a data relay for the 2018 mission.

Roscosmos will be responsible for the 2018 descent module and surface platform, and will provide launchers for both missions. Both partners will supply scientific instruments and will cooperate closely in the scientific exploitation of the missions.

ExoMars will also prepare the ground, so to say, for the next big future mission by testing and demonstrating core technologies under development by European industry such as landing, roving, drilling and sample preparation that are an essential part for the next big step in the robotic exploration of Mars: a sample-return mission.

“This is a momentous occasion for the ExoMars programme that will see industry and scientists from Europe and Russia working together on these two exciting missions, which will develop new technologies that will demonstrate the competitiveness of European industry, be important for preparing a solid participation of ESA in future international exploration missions and address the key question of whether life ever arose on Mars,” said ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain on the occasion of meeting with the head of Roscosmos Vladimir Popovkin at ESA Headquarters in Paris today to sign the agreement that seals ExoMars as a partnership.

“It confirms again that projects of such tremendous scale have to be implemented through international cooperation. The scientific data that we are going to obtain during all the planned missions are important for the worldwide community.”