ightglobal.com 11-17 June 2019 | Flight International | 73
PARIS
European Space Agencymunications relay, working in conjunction
with Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Recon-
naissance Orbiter. Critically, TGO will be Ro-
salind’s link to Earth during its 2021 entry,
descent and landing, and the spacecraft is al-
ready being manoeuvred to ensure it will be
in the right orbit at that critical time.
A second half of the 2016 mission did not
fare so well. To test entry, descent and land-
ing technology for the rover mission, a sta-
tionary landing platform named Schiaparelli
- after 19th Century Italian astronomer Gio-
vanni, who mapped the planet’s surface fea-
tures – accompanied TGO to Mars. The two
separated on approach to the planet, but
while the orbiter has performed flawlessly,
Schiaparelli – designed for the landing test
and then to survive on battery power for a
few days to support a science payload – hit
the ground hard and was destroyed.
Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult; the
atmosphere is too thin for effective use of para-
chutes alone, but thick enough to demand
elaborate shielding to protect a spacecraft from
the heat generated as it enters the air at hyper-
sonic speed. Parachutes, heat shields and rock-
ets are all needed to land safely.
Your correspondent, on the sidelines of the
Rosalind naming event, made the mistake of
asking Woerner what seemed at the time like
a quite reasonable question: was he confident,
after the Schiaparelli failure, of getting Ro-
salind safely to the surface?
“Schiaparelli,” he shot back, “was not a fail-
ure”. This mission was, after all, a test. And, in
that test the heat shield worked, the parachute
worked, separation of the heat shield and para-
chute worked, engine start worked. But the
computer stopped the engine too early, after
just 3s instead of 30s – the lander’s rate of rota-
tion after about 3min in the atmosphere was
enough to “saturate” the sensors, leading the
computer to believe it was below ground level- and so “we had a hard touchdown”. But
ESA got all of the data and understands very
clearly what went wrong.
In short, Woerner is confident of success in
putting Rosalind on the surface.
But he went on to stress that language is
critical. The European press, he laments, is
quick to talk of “failure”. Compare coverage
in Europe and the USA of SpaceX’s first at-
tempts to recover, by fly-back and soft land-
ing, a Falcon 9 rocket booster. In the UK and
Europe, flames-smoke-kaboom was “failure”- but the US press shouted: “Almost!” In Eu-
rope, urges Woerner: “We have to change our
culture.”
Meanwhile, work continues apace to get
Rosalind ready to fly. Multiple shifts have
been working in Stevenage to build and test
a flight-ready rover, and its surface science
platform has been delivered from Russia to
Italy for integration with the German-built
carrier module that will transport the rover to
Mars on board a Russian Proton Breeze rock-
et. David Parker, ESA’s director of human
and robotic spaceflight, told FlightGlobal in
Stevenage that 1,000 people in Europe are
associated with this project. ESA alone has
40 people dedicated to it and a budget of
€150 million ($165 million) per year.
INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION
Ultimately, ExoMars is a triumph of
international co-operation. The programme
dates to early-2000s European concepts for
Mars exploration, but was derailed in 2011
when a cash-strapped NASA – the launch
and transit-to-Mars provider – had to drop
out. Fortunately, Roscosmos stepped in with
Proton rides for both segments and some
scientific payloads.
Then, with the TGO-Schiaparelli mission
already in deep space, the 2018 follow-up
wobbled over cost worries and concerns that
the hardware would not be ready in time.
The 2018 launch was pushed back to 2020 –
Mars and Earth are at their closest every two
years. Speaking in Stevenage, Woerner
warmed to a favourite theme; despite the
“Earthly crisis” that may characterise east-
west geopolitics, it is right to work together.
Beyond ExoMars – and no-one would head
a space agency without a penchant for look-
ing to the future – Woerner says the dream re-
mains to send astronauts to our nearest celes-
tial neighbour. However, he says, there is
much work to be done.
Critically, we need the technical ability to
bring a crew home in the event of mishap.
Where the Apollo 13 mission could avert trag-
edy by flying its stricken spacecraft around
the Moon to return home in a couple of days,
no such flightplan is possible for a crew that
finds itself in trouble months away in deep
space. We also need to better understand
some basic science, such as the radiation risk
to a Mars mission crew, Woerner adds.
Ultimately, he notes, for Apollo 11 there
was a 50% chance of success – and we would
never take such risks today. A human mission
to Mars will happen, but not soon.
And, he says, when it does happen – or
when it starts to look possible – we cannot
resurrect the Apollo notion of a space race.
Co-operation, he says, is the future.
Competition is a driver, but “co-operation is
an enabler”. ■S Corvaja/ESAA flight-representative Rosalind
prototype on show at Airbus
Defence & Space in Stevenage“The name Rosalind reminds
us that it is in the human
genes to explore”
Jan Woerner
Director general, ESA