The European Space Agency ESA has been working on this project for a very long time in order to bring a rover to Mars itself for the first time. But the company ExoMars seems to be cursed. In 2018, problems with the complex parachute system prevented the originally planned launch. Then, in 2020, the launch was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. And now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dashed all hopes of launching the rover in 2022. For the research team, the situation is particularly dire. “I couldn’t talk about this mission for weeks without crying,” says Valérie Ciarletti of the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Environments, Space Observations (LATMOS) in France. Ciarletti leads the rover’s underground radar working group.
Work on the project has been going on for more than 20 years and now the fully assembled rover is waiting at a facility in Turin. It seems increasingly unlikely that ExoMars will ever take off. It is far from certain whether ESA even wants to make a fourth launch attempt or whether the mission will simply be aborted. The project could still be saved, but at what cost?