ExoMars Delayed to 2018

The European Space Agency's (ESA) flagship mission to the Red Planet, the ExoMars rover, has been delayed to 2018, after delegates from EU members states agreed to the proposition the space agency made. The 2016 launch window, for which ExoMars was originally planned, would be taken up by an orbiter and a small, static lander instead, the agency revealed. The reason for the delay is that the Europeans are pushing towards fitting the alloted budget for the mission and also for introducing as many scientific pieces of equipment as possible into the rover, the BBC News reports.

The current budget for the ExoMars mission – as established last November by a triennial ministerial meeting – is of 850 million euros, a sum that is simply insufficient to cover all the expenses associated with integrating that much new technology aboard a single, small, car-sized machine. Because of this, the agency agreed to team up with NASA in the future, to explore the Red Planet. Jointly, the two agencies decided that the costs of individual exploring craft on Mars were simply too high, and that a teamed approach was the best solution. The collaboration would start in 2016, they recently announced.

“The council was pretty good. The two-mission scenario is accepted by all and the long-term cooperation with the US is welcomed. For ExoMars, we have got an agreed technical basis that should work for everybody. For me, resource is now the fundamental issue,” ESA Director of Science and Robotics, Professor David Southwood told the British news agency. The issue now is that member states will most likely not want the total price tag on ExoMars to be above one billion euros, which raises concerns about the replacement mission, scheduled for 2016.

The 2016 mission is not terribly important in itself, but the Europeans want to send scientific instruments to the surface of the Red Planet in order to gain valuable information about entry, descent and landing technologies, which they now desperately lack. NASA has this type of knowledge, having already sent numerous rovers, landers, and orbiters to Mars. The rover that was envisioned for launch in 2016 would most likely be very small and short-lived, ESA officials said, because the mass margin that would remain after the orbiter was launched would not allow for a larger machine to be sent to the planet.