British rover will go to Mars despite worrying crash landing, says European Space Agency 

The ExoMars rover undergoing tests at the Airbus Mars Yard in Stevenage 
The ExoMars rover undergoing tests at the Airbus Mars Yard in Stevenage 

A European mission to land a rover on Mars will go ahead despite a test run ending in failure last month.

The European Space Agency (Esa) announced on Friday that member states had agreed to provide the 440 million euro (£370 million) needed to ensure the future of ExoMars Rover, which is currently being built at Airbus in Stevenage.

The future of the project looked in doubt after a probe designed to make a test landing on the Red Planet crashed into the surface in November.

However European science ministers decided to back the mission at a pivotal Esa council meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The space agency's director general, Jan Woerner, said: "Today I am very confident that we will do it ... We need to work hard because it's not only some rover, we have the payloads from different sources - all of this has to pack together.

"It's not an easy thing, but we are confident that we will succeed."

The ExoMars orbiter is currently orbiting Mars taking samples of the atmosphere 
The ExoMars orbiter is currently orbiting Mars taking samples of the atmosphere 

The mission, the second stage of a two-part programme costing 1.3 billion euro (£1.09 billion), is due to land a rover on the Red Planet in 2021 to drill into the Martian soil and look for biochemical traces of living or dead microbes.

But the ExoMars Rover has had a difficult history and come close to being abandoned on more than one occasion.

Originally it was to have been a joint enterprise with Nasa, but the American space agency pulled out and a new partnership was formed with Russia's agency, Roscosmos.

In May, the launch date was put back two years because of problems with delivering hardware.

But the mission suffered its most serious setback in October when the demonstrator lander Schiaparelli, designed to test the rover's landing system, crashed on the surface of Mars.

The Schiaparelli probe crashed on Mars in November 
The Schiaparelli probe crashed on Mars in November 

Experts have said lessons would be learned from the loss, caused by a glitch that meant the probe sensed it had landed when still more than a mile above the planet's surface.

The Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft which carried Schiaparelli to Mars is said to be functioning well. Next year it will start sniffing the planet's atmosphere for trace gases including methane, which may indicate the presence of life.

David Parker, the agency's director of human spaceflight and robotic exploration, said: "The UK has provided the amount of funding requested for the space station and indeed has made some indications about longer term commitment as well, so it was positive.

“The UK has to pay its way on the ISS to have any hope of another British astronaut following in the footsteps of Tim Peake.”

 

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