The ESA Council decided to abandon the joint ExoMars program with Russia, citing "the impossibility of continuing cooperation with Roscosmos."

The ESA said in a statement that the council has tasked agency CEO Josef Aschbacher with launching "accelerated studies" that will find an alternative option for getting a European rover to Mars. According to the program, this was supposed to be done by the Russian landing platform.

The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, noted that ESA's refusal of the project is "a very bitter event for all space enthusiasts." However, the corporation intends to explore Mars on its own.

“Yes, we will lose a few years, but we will repeat our lander, provide it with the Angara launch vehicle, and conduct this research expedition on our own from the new launch complex of the Vostochny cosmodrome,” Rogozin wrote.

The goal of the joint project of Roscosmos and ESA "ExoMars" was to search for evidence of the existence of life on Mars. The project consisted of two stages. As part of the first, two spacecraft were launched in 2016 - the orbital Trace Gas Orbiter for observing the atmosphere and the surface of the planet and the Schiaparelli landing module. At the second stage to Mars, a Russian landing platform with a European rover was supposed to be launched. The launch was supposed to take place in 2020, but was postponed to 2022.

Now, ESA's decision means that the launch of the rover will be delayed until at least 2024, depending on what launch measures the agency can take and whether it needs to look for a replacement for the Russian landing platform. The ESA statement did not mention the potential additional costs that this decision might entail and its impact on other ESA programs.

Events around Ukraine have significantly affected the space industry around the world; work on several projects stopped. So, on March 3, the Board of Directors of OneWeb voted to suspend all launches from Baikonur: the company's satellites on March 4 were supposed to go into space on the Russian Soyuz rocket. On the same day, Roscosmos stopped joint experiments on the ISS with the German Aviation and Cosmonautics Center due to sanctions from the European side.

On March 1, information appeared in foreign media that NASA was considering options for keeping the ISS in orbit without Russia's participation. Later, Dmitry Rogozin said that work on the ISS under the current conditions would be inefficient, but noted that Roscosmos would work on launching its own orbital station.

bbabo.Net