Airbus designs Mars Rover to recover collected soil samples – IT Pro – News

The European Space Agency (ESA) awarded Airbus a contract worth 4.4 billion euros for the manufacture of a Mars rover that must take soil samples as soon as possible. 2026, collected during NASA's March 2020 mission and left behind.

Airbus will design the Mars Rover at their British factory at Stevenage. According to Ben Boyes of Airbus, it is a relatively small rover of about 130 kg, but the demands placed on the aircraft are high. For example, the rover has to travel great distances with a high degree of autonomy, the routes to the abandoned soil samples to be planned each day. Stevenage's British Airbus team is also responsible for the ExoMars mission in Europe and Russia, where a March rover is expected to be launched in July 2020 to look for signs of life from March 2021 on Mars.

In April NASA and ESA signed a letter of intent whereby organizations pledged to bring back Earth samples from Earth and Earth Mars by the end of the next decade . The launch of the Mars 2020 mission is scheduled for 2020. The Mars rover used for this purpose must collect samples and store them in storage tubes. These are left behind and it is up to the new Mars rover to be designed to pick up these samples with a robot arm of 2026.

This European Mars-Rover will collect the collected samples, which they will be collected during 150 days. can seize, deliver to an American rocket that will take the cargo of Mars into space, where a European spacecraft is waiting to bring the samples back to the ground. After delivering the samples, the thief will stay on the red planet to film the takeoff. The technology for this complex mission is still under development and the question of whether it is achievable still needs to be resolved. As a result, there is a chance that the timeline will eventually be shifted