72 | Flight International | 11-17 June 2019 flightglobal.com
PARIS
Special report
Mars, give
us your best
Exploration and science are in our DNA – and a double-
helix heroine is getting the great but belated honour of
having a remarkable laboratory-rover named after her
O
f all the big questions pondered
by humankind, few generate as
much interest as “are we alone?”
We – and our animal, insect,
plant and microbial cohabitors here on Earth
- may or may not be the sole living creatures
in the Universe. We may not even be alone
among the cosmically inconsequential specks
of dust that are our solar system.
This is a question with enormous scientif-
ic and psychological implications. Knowing
for sure we are not alone would overturn
centuries of assumptions about our relative
importance and even security. While we
may one day discover life beyond our planet,
the absence of proof that we do share crea-
tion with other living things merely leaves
the question open.
Starting, sensibly, near to home, “are we
alone?” can be practically reframed as “is
there life on Mars?” No small portion of the
time, effort and money put into space explora-
tion is directed at this question. Do not expect
any answers at this year’s Paris air show, but
by the time the 2021 event opens we may be
closer to finding out – thanks to a sophisticat-
ed automated biology laboratory that is to be
carried around Mars on a quadbike-sized
robotic rover named Rosalind.
That’s Rosalind as in Rosalind Franklin –
the British chemist whose 1950s X-ray dif-
fraction studies revealed the double-helix
structure of DNA. Rover Rosalind, built for
the European Space Agency (ESA) by Airbus
Defence & Space in Stevenage in the UK,
could not be better named. Revealing the
name earlier this year at the site, Alice Bunn,
the UK Space Agency’s international engage-
ment director, said the selection committee
jumped on Rosalind as the obvious choice
from some 36,000 entries submitted from
across ESA’s 22 member states.
Whether or not this ExoMars 2020 mission- a partnership between ESA and its Russian
counterpart Roscosmos, set to launch in sum-
mer 2020 for a nine-month interplanetary
journey – finds life or its remnants on Mars,
this recognition of Franklin is overdue.
Had she not died in 1958 aged just 37, she
should reasonably have shared the 1962
Nobel Prize awarded to James Watson,
Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for dis-
covering the double helix foundation of life - life on Earth, anyway. As ESA director gen-
eral Jan Woerner put it: “This name reminds
us that it is in the human genes to explore.
Science is in our DNA, and in everything we
do at ESA. Rosalind the rover captures this
spirit and carries us all to the forefront of
space exploration.”SECOND PHASE
The 2020 mission is the second phase of the
ExoMars programme. The first mission
launched in 2016 and delivered ESA’s Trace
Gas Orbiter (TGO), a Martian satellite with a
dual role. TGO arrived at Mars in late 2016
and spent a year in “aerobraking” manoeu-
vres – skimming the atmosphere to slow
down enough to gradually reduce its highly
elliptical insertion orbit to a broadly circular
path for its operational phase.
As its name implies, TGO is scanning the
atmosphere to detail its composition more
precisely than is possible from Earth or via
other orbiters. ESA’s still-operational Mars
Express, for example, identified traces of
methane in 2004. First results from the far
more sensitive TGO, published earlier this
year, reveal methane in tiny concentrations.
Historical observations of methane suggest
variation of its atmospheric concentration,
so while methane can arise from geological
processes, seasonal variation might imply
biological origin.
TGO’s second purpose is to act as a com-DAN THISDELL STEVENAGE
SAGAT HandlingShuttle service: the mission’s
landing platform has already
been transported to Italy