European Space Agency’s Director General Josef Aschbacher has said that the agency has terminated its cooperation with Russia to launch Europe’s first planetary rover.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, and ESA were working hand in hand on a mission to launch the European ExoMars Rover. The Rover has been designed to look for signs of life on Mars.
Initially suspended in March just weeks after Russia invaded of Ukraine, the rover was set for a September 2022 launch. According to the CNN, the ESA Council has officially cut ties with Roscosmos on this joint project as a result of the war in Ukraine and ongoing sanctions, ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher wrote Tuesday on Twitter.
There will be more details shared about the future of the mission on July 20, he said. The ESA has been considering working more closely with NASA moving forward since it became clear the agency needed “to sever” its ties with Russia, Aschbacher said.
“Geopolitically, it is clear that we need to sever our ties with Russia, and this decision has been made by the member states,” Aschbacher told CNN. “So yes, it’s really unfortunate for all the science and technology and the engineers who have been working on this for four decades. But there is no other choice to make.”
Originally scheduled to launch in July 2020, the rover’s launch schedule was pushed back by the onset of the pandemic.
According to the ESA, ExoMars is also known as Rosalind Franklin, who was a revered scientist and aided in the decoding of DNA’s molecular structure.
NASA says that part of the rover’s mission includes drilling holes up to 6.6 feet (2 meters) to collect samples for onboard analysis. ExoMars is expected to travel multiple kilometers during its mission and is capable of moving between 164 and 328 feet (50 and 100 meters) per Martian day, which is just under an hour longer than Earth’s 24 hours.
