In April of this year, the American space Agency NASA and the European space Agency (ESA) agreed to consider the possibility of delivering samples of Martian soil to Earth in future missions to the Red planet. According to the latest news, ESA signed a contract with Airbus in the amount of $ 5.2 million, to developed a concept design of the new Rover that will collect samples of Martian soil.
The creation of a new Mars Rover will take to the headquarters of Airbus, located in Stevenage. The European space Agency selected the English unit of Airbus as a developer of a new Rover because at the moment the company leads the development of the Rover, however, for another mission, ExoMars, a joint project between ESA and the Russian state Corporation Roscosmos Mars exploration. It should go to the red planet in 2021, in the second part of this space mission.
In contrast to the ExoMars Rover project, which will be equipped with many scientific instruments and will perform many scientific tasks, only the task under discussion today, Rover will be to collect samples of Martian soil. He won’t even have to drill the Martian surface.
A series of drillings will carry the Rover, which will travel to the neighboring planet in 2020 will be the successor of the Mars Rover “Kyuriositi” which is currently crisscrossing the surface of the red planet. After this “Rover 2020” will gather soil samples in 30 special containers, which are then left in various points of the route. The Rover-the collector, developed by Airbus, will go to Mars 2026. After reaching the destination, he will gather the scattered containers with the soil samples using its robotic arm.
Ben Boyers, head of the technical team Airbus adds:
“It will be a relatively compact Rover, weighing about 130 pounds. But it will have a big problem. The car will have to travel long distances, most of the time working offline and a daily paving their own future path of the movement”.
Early design of the new Rover collector Airbus
It is expected that the collection of all specimen containers left by “Mars Rover 2020” at the Rover-the collector may take about 150 days. After that, he will need to find the lander, with whom he will arrive on Mars. The Rover will load all the containers into the machine, after which he will produce the rise (will be the first takeoff from Mars) and meet on-orbit spacecraft, which will carry the samples back to Earth.
Of course, all this will be possible only after specialists of both companies will evaluate the economic feasibility of the project and will also address the issue of development of technologies for the implementation of such a space mission.
Airbus will build Mars Rover to collect samples of Martian soil and return them to Earth
Nikolai Khizhnyak