Europe Aims Lone Rover For Mars

[zavvy]

<b>Europe Aims Lone Rover For Mars</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />Europe has fixed on a concept for its next mission to land on the Red Planet. <br /><br />It aims to send a single robot rover to the Martian surface along with another, stationary, science package. <br /><br />The European Space Agency (Esa) had also been considering a mission concept from the British team behind Beagle 2, but this is no longer on the table. <br /><br />However, the Beagle team could yet see their science instruments, or ones derived from them, carried on the 580-million-euro mobile laboratory. <br /><br />A three-day meeting next week at the space agency's European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, will discuss what experiments the craft should take to Mars, and the UK team has submitted its own ideas and proposals. <br /><br />Two-pronged mission <br /><br />Their BeagleNet concept for the mission - which envisaged dropping two small rovers on the planet - has fallen out of the running and Esa has opted instead for the single rover concept loosely referred to as ExoMars. <br /><br />The Mars lander is part of Esa's Aurora programme, a long-term plan for robotic and - potentially - human exploration of the Solar System, with Mars, the Moon and the asteroids as likely targets. <br /><br />"It is a two-pronged mission: there will be a rover and a fixed station, which will do geophysics, meteorology and environment studies," explained Dr Mark Sims, of Leicester University, who is chairman of the UK's Aurora Advisory Committee. <br /><br />"The fixed station and/or the rover may contain elements of a Beagle 2-type payload. Whether it does or not is very much dependent on the discussions next week." <br /><br />A primary objective of the mission is to search for signs of past or present life; it will leave Earth in June 2011 and arrive at Mars in June 2013. <br /><br />Vital tools <br /><br />Esa is c