New Mission: ExoMars

Let the rovers roll! The European Space Agency has announced its first Aurora Program mission, and it’s called ExoMars. The goal is to search for evidence of past and present life in samples from the top 2 meters of Martian surface. This is a rover that carries around a laboratory platform. In looking for Extant Life they will search for biological markers, including amino acids, nucleobases, sugars, phopholipids, and pigments. To search for extinct life, they will look for organic residues, and fossil organisms and their structures. Geochemical and mineralogical effects of biology on the environment will also be examined, but this is a second order marker.

This mission will look to answer the question, if organics are delivered to Mars by meteoritic and cometary infall – what happens to them? The search will start by looking at places that may be protected from UV radiation, and may have a combination of warmth and water. For extinct life, they will focus their search on looking sedimentary deposits in ancient lake beds.
This rover is engineered to spend 6 months (180 sols) conducting 7 experiment Cycles  and 2 vertical surveys – This is spec limit. They could easily just keep going like MERs.

The mission will launch in 2013 and arrive in Martian orbit in 2014. From a parking orbit, they will land when conditions are optimal (e.g. no dust storms). Once in palce, they will use NASA spacecraft to relay data back to Earth. They are looking to land at latitudes as far north as 30degrees or maybe even 45 degrees toward pole. To land, they will use a parachute to slow the craft, engage jets to slow, and finally land (without bouncing) on bottom airbags. The rover has tiltable solar panels that allow them to match panels to conditions of landing site. They will have extensive instrumentation, including panoramic cameras, an infrared spectrometer, ground penetrating radar (Oooo, Cool) that penetrates to 3 m with 1cm resolution (Think CSI finding body in cement). In the lab package they also have a close-up microscopic imager, Mossbauer spectrometer, Ramen X-Ray spectrometer and more.

Under ideal conditions, the rover will go up to an outcrop of sedimentary rock coated in regolith, and then dig through the rigolith to sample protected sediments. These samples will be looked at with a microscope and ramen/LIBS, crushed and looked at in mass spectrometers and look at mineralogy and organics (again, think CSI).

The rover will also have what amounts to a full weather station: Humidity sensors, meteorological sensors, dust sensors, UV and VIS spectrometers, radiation sensors, and more!

They are currently selecting their landing site location – Please give us your input. They want astrobiology community input.

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