A UK team has been awarded more than £10 million to replace Russian components in the Rosalind Franklin Mars Rover.
A European mission to explore life on Mars has been given a major boost after a UK firm was awarded more than £10 million to replace Russian components in the Rosalind Franklin Mars Rover, Space Minister Andrew Griffith announced today (Thursday 23 November).
The rover, which was built by Airbus in Stevenage as part of a European Space Agency programme, was due to launch in 2022 before collaboration with Russia’s space agency was cancelled following the illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Now, the UK Space Agency will provide an additional £10.7 million to a UK team to replace a Russian-made instrument on the Rosalind Franklin rover, with the aim of launching to Mars in 2028. It brings the total government investment in the Rosalind Franklin, through the UK Space Agency, to £377 million.
The rover is expected to travel several kilometres across the planet in search of a site with high potential of evidence of life on Mars. It will collect samples by drilling to a depth of around two metres below its surface, before using next-generation instruments to analyse findings in an onboard laboratory.
The new funding will allow a UK team, led by the University of Aberystwyth, to build the new instrument, named Enfys – meaning ‘rainbow’ in Welsh. It will identify targets on the surface of Mars for sampling and analysis, which could in turn reveal evidence of life on the Red Planet.
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