ESA continues Mars mission despite Schiaparelli . crash

The ESA will continue its mission to have a rover on Mars by 2021. There were fears that the Mars mission would be canceled, but the member states of the European Space Agency have nevertheless agreed to the financing.

During a two-day meeting in Switzerland, the member countries voted on the budget for the coming years. Part of the meetings was to allocate the necessary EUR 436 million to continue the ExoMars 2020 mission. Part of this is to have a rover on the planet Mars by the year 2021. It should be the successor to the first ExoMars mission, which came to an end last month by the crash of the Schiaparelli lander. With the now allocated 436 million euros, ExoMars has sufficient funds to carry out the mission costing a total of 1.3 billion euros.

Although a second ExoMars mission was already planned, the financing of the project was not yet fully completed. There were fears that the ESA would not approve the mission due to the failures surrounding the Schiaparelli lander. Probably a programming error was the reason for the crash of the rover. As a result, the measuring instruments do not correctly estimate the altitude during landing.

In total, the countries of the ESA have agreed to spend 10.3 billion euros on space-related matters in the coming years. These include projects in the field of scientific research, R&D and social programmes.