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ExoMars orbiter from ESA, which will serve as a relay satellite for the Sample Return mission. Photo credit: ESA
T The European Space Agency (ESA) awarded contracts for technological projects to build a Mars rover to collect soil samples, and a spaceship back for bringing back safe and sound
won the initial contracts to design two vehicle prototypes, Sample Fetch Rover and Earth Return Orbiter, which will be designed and developed at its Stevenage facility in England.
The Sample Fetch Rover will retrieve 36 sample tubes of Martian soils and rocks. Left behind by the 2020 Mars Rover, a mission to be launched in July 2020. While the 2020 rover design is based on Curiosity, it will collect and drop samples for the Fetch Rover to retrieve and bring back to Earth, rather than d & rsquo; Conduct onboard analysis as does Curiosity.
The Fetch Rover sample will launch in 2026, loaded to carry the samples loading them into a container the size of a basketball in the Mars Ascent Vehicle of ESA, which will then launched from the Martian surface. e to drop the samples into orbit.
A model of Fetch Rover for the first models. Image Credit: Airbus
The third component of the mission is the Earth Return Orbiter, which captures the sample container, seals it in a biological containment system, and returns the samples to Earth.
Simultaneously, the ESA ExoMars rover drill below the Martian surface to search for evidence of life, and the ExoMars orbiter currently sampling the Mars atmosphere will be a crucial part of the communications infrastructure for the return sample mission, for which it will serve as a relay satellite.
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David Parker, Director of Human Exploration and Robotics at ESA, stressed the importance of the proposed mission
"Bringing back samples of Mars is essential in more ways than one.First, to understand why Mars, although the planet is the most Earth-like, has taken an evolutionary path very different from the Earth and secondly to fully understand the Martian environment in order to allow humans to work and live one day on the Red Planet. "I am very pleased that with these two studies now commissioned and in combination with other studies conducted elsewhere in Europe, we are making another important step to explore Mars. "
It is estimated that it could take juice that at 150 days for the fetch rover to retrieve all the boxes that the 2020 rover leaves behind, before locating the rocket with which it landed, and filming the takeoff of Earth Return Orbiter.
If all goes as planned, the first samples of Martian soil on Earth before the end of the next decade – and the first images of a takeoff from Mars.
Below is a 360-degree rendering of the ExoMars rover, who will be looking for life on Mars March while the Rover recovers the 2020 samples.
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