Europe’s bold attempt to search for life on Mars will launch as planned in 2020, despite concerns over escalating costs and the spectacular loss of the mission’s lander demonstrator.
European Space Agency (ESA) member states agreed to stump up the extra 440 million euro (£370 million) needed to ensure the future of the ExoMars Rover.
The mission, the second stage of a two-part programme costing 1.3 billion euro (£1.09 billion), is due to land a rover on the Red Planet in 2021 to drill into the Martian soil and look for biochemical traces of living or dead microbes.
European science ministers decided to back the mission at a pivotal ESA council meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland.
“Today I am very confident that we will do it,” said the space agency’s director general, Jan Worner. “We need to work hard because it’s not only some rover, we have the payloads from different sources – all of this has to pack together. It’s not an easy thing, but we are confident that we will succeed.”
However he said there had been “no free ticket” from the member states. ExoMars would, at least initially, “eat up” the whole of a 1 per cent per year increase in ESA’s science budget, which was also agreed at the meeting.
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