Mars Rover Meant to Search for Life Delayed

As you may have heard, there's a war going on between Russia and Ukraine. This has disrupted a great many things, and perhaps ultimately the fate of a Mars-bound rover is not the most important thing in the world. But the European ExoMars rover was supposed to look for Martian life, and now it's going to be several years before it can do that. And that's too bad.

So what happened? Well, the European Space Agency and Russia worked together on the ExoMars rover, and while the rover itself is done, the ESA was relying on a Russian rocket, the Russian launching sit in Kazakhstan to get it to Mars, and a Russian landing platform to actually get the rover on the surface. The launch was supposed to happen in September this year, but with the sanctions and ESA pulling out of all cooperation with Russia, that's not going to happen. So, when will this rover launch? We can only send rockets to Mars every couple years, so the next launch window is in 2024, but the split seems unlikely to have been mended by then.

Realistically, the ESA doesn't think the rover will be launched until 2028, which will give Europe enough time to build their own launching/landing platform. This is for a rover that was originally supposed to be launched in 2018. Delays and missions into outer space are not strangers to each other, but a decade is a lot. The dual U.S./Europe Mars sample return mission will fly before then, rendering the rover mildly pointless. It may as well go, since it's been built, but it won't be as groundbreaking as originally hoped. 

Curiosity Reaches 8 Years on Mars

It's impressive, but it's still got 6 years before it matches Opportunity. NASA really knows how to make its Mars rovers, it seems, and we can only hope Perseverance, the new rover recently launched, has just as much good luck as its older siblings.

A New Idea For Exploring Venus

Venus is not a nice place. The atmosphere is basically all carbon dioxide, it rains acid, and the surface temperature is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite being closer than Mars, no space probe has touched down on Venus since the mid 1980s. Why would we bother? Your typical spacecraft would last a few hours at most before succumbing to the extreme conditions. To explore the Venusian surface, we'd have to bring something very atypical.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Enter the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments. This isn't a copy of the rovers currently trundling around Mars. This would basically be a tank. No, seriously, it even looks like a WWI-era tank. But the big thing is that most of it would be mechanical, not electronic. Electronics are too fragile for Venus, unless they're buried deep inside, away from the heat. The rover would mostly rely on wind for power, and would communicate with an overhead orbiter using, essentially, Morse code. The people behind the concept believe they could get nearly a year of research out of the rover before the Venusian environment proves too much. Not a huge amount of time, but definitely better than a couple of hours.

I really hope this particular concept becomes a reality. I don't know, I just think there's something really cool about it. It's very outside the box. We think of space travel as the cutting edge of technology, but in the case of Venus, the environment is so relentlessly terrible that you have to think in the opposite direction. Don't get fancy, get simple. Don't send a delicate, spindly little thing, send a tank.

Mars 2020 Rover: Is It Behind Schedule?

At least, that's the word on the street. It's a very weird street.

Anyway, according to NASA's Office of Inspector General, the new Mars 2020 rover, which is headed of to Mars in, uh, 2020, is lagging behind schedule in several areas. The biggest problems are that the sample collecting technology isn't where it needs to be, and five out of the seven main science instruments are on a "condensed development schedule".

What does this mean? Well, it probably means there will be cost overrides, and the Mars 2020 rover, budgeted at $2.4 billion, wasn't exactly cheap to start off with. It also means the rover might not be able to do as much science as was initially hoped, or it might mean the rover will have to wait until the next launch window. So, look forward to the launch of the Mars 2020 rover in...2022. They almost had it.

Opportunity's Still Going

It's been more than ten years since Opportunity landed on Mars, and the rover's still going at it, still sending back useful data, still trundling along at the incredibly rapid pace of a couple inches a second...at maximum speed.  Hey, over ten years, that adds up to, well, not that much.  A bit over 25 miles, which does surpass the record for most distance traveled on an off-world surface.

After so long on Mars, it's only natural that Opportunity has developed a few problems.  Frankly, it's amazing that none of those problems have stopped it, but they haven't.  In the past couple of months, the rover's been having computer trouble.  It's needed rebooting a dozen times, and the time has come for a drastic solution.  A complete memory wipe.  That will get rid of the glitches slowing Opportunity down, and allow it to get back to the mission.  According to NASA, this is a low-risk procedure, and Opportunity should be just fine.  It'll probably run better than it has in years.  So, hopefully nothing to worry about for the tough little rover.