PARIS – Because of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, Europe is going to have to wait at least several more years and may need NASA’s help before its first planned Mars rover can drill into the planet’s dusty surface, seeking signs of whether it ever hosted life.
The European Space Agency said that it will no longer attempt to send the ExoMars rover aloft this year on a Russian rocket and may now have to strip out the mission’s many Russian components.
A launch with Russia´s state space corporation, Roscosmos, is now “practically impossible but also politically impossible,” the agency´s director, Josef Aschbacher, said. “This year, the launch is gone.”
Like trying to untangle spaghetti, experts will now try and figure out how to do without the Russian technology that’s woven into the mission. A heater that was meant to keep the rover from freezing on Mars is, for example, Russian.
So, too, is the bulk of the mission’s Kazachok landing platform, which means “little Cossack” in Russian. The largely European six-wheeled rover was meant to roll off that platform onto the Martian surface.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Aschbacher said the space agency will now sift “bit by bit and component by component” through the mission, to determine how much time is needed “to really do it without the Russians.” Alternatives might be sourced from Europe and with the help of NASA, he said.
Because of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, “we need to untangle all this cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I can also tell you, but also a very complex one, and we have to do it,” he said.
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