Business · Ars Technica
NASA agreed to launch the 2016 and 2018 missions on a pair of United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets
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But NASA pulled out of the agreement less than three years later.
Key facts
- The rover, by then named for the late British chemist and DNA research pioneer Rosalind Franklin, was nearly ready for launch in 2020 when a series of parachute test failures and the COVID-19
- NASA agreed to launch the 2016 and 2018 missions on a pair of United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets
- Rosalind Franklin will be the first mission to extract and analyze soil samples from as deep as 6 feet (2 meters) into the Martian crust
- NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida
Summary
NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. So why is NASA deciding which rocket will launch a flagship European Mars mission? A few years after NASA landed its first rover on Mars in 1997, the European Space Agency came up with a plan to send its own mobile robot to the red planet. The European rover was part of a program named Aurora, and officials hoped to launch it in 2009. This has become the understatement. The European rover was to fly to Mars in tandem with a similarly-sized US rover in 2018. A European orbiter designed to sniff out traces of methane in the Martian atmosphere would launch in 2016, two years before the rovers. NASA agreed to launch the 2016 and 2018 missions on a pair of United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets.
Instead, the agency turned to Russia to launch the orbiter and rover on two Proton rockets and provide the descent system to deliver the rover to Mars. In exchange, ESA agreed to add Russian science instruments to the orbiter and rover missions.