British rover to search for life buried on Mars
British-built space exploration vehicle with drilling capability could solve mystery of alien life
A British-built rover is to drill deep into the surface of Mars looking for signs of alien habitation. Engineers at Airbus in Hertfordshire are this week installing cameras on the European Space Agency’s Exomars vehicle before it leaves for testing in France. If all goes to plan, the system, designed by engineers at University College London, will be launched from Kazakhstan next year and will land on Mars on March 19 2021. The rover named “Rosalind Franklin” after the first person to photograph DNA, will drill 6ft into the ground for samples.
THE possibility of life on Mars may finally be answered in 2021 when a British-built rover starts drilling deep into the Red Planet’s surface looking for signs of alien habitation.
Engineers at Airbus in Hertfordshire are this week installing a suite of cameras on the European Space Agency’s Exomars exploration vehicle before it leaves for testing in France.
If all goes to plan, the “pan-cam” system, designed by engineers at University College London, will be launched from Kazakhstan nest year and will land on Mars on March 19 2021.
After 10 days of checks it will begin scanning the surface of the planet, looking for minerals and liquids that could have hosted extraterrestrial organisms.
Once a potential hot spot is discovered, the rover named “Rosalind Franklin” after the first person to photograph DNA, will trundle to the area at a speed of about 47in per hour, before drilling more than 6ft into the ground to take samples.
The Martian rocks will be fed through an aperture on the rover into a mobile laboratory where they will be crushed up and examined for organic matter. Confirmation of life could come within weeks of the rover landing on its £1.4 billion mission.
“One of the unique features of the Exomars rover is the capability to drill down further than any other rover so far,” said Sue Horne, head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency.
“Mars is really inhospitable, and all the rovers so far have been scraping around on the surface and they haven’t found anything yet.
“Analysis of radiation damage has shown that you have to get one metre below the surface to get to regions that haven’t been affected. Pan-cam is critical for the science. The minerals show us where life might have once been.”
Hopes were raised in the search for life on Mars in 2013 when Nasa’s Curiosity rover recorded methane “burps” – a waste product of organisms on Earth. Scientists now think the gas probably came from geological activity, and believe there is little chance of finding living organisms on the planet.
The team assembling the rover have to adhere to strict hygiene rules set out by Cospar, the UN’S Committee on Space Research, which states they cannot transport more than 9,800 bacterial or viral spores to the surface. Not only could it pollute the planet, but it would also skew the science.
If they were to leave just one fingerprint on the rover before launch it would need to be surgically cleaned all over again which is why engineers must wear hairnets, hoods, two pairs of sterile gloves, overalls and a face mask.
They even wear goggles to prevent eyelashes straying in to the machinery, and one person – dubbed the “clean buddy” – must watch colleagues to ensure they do not touch their faces and contaminate the equipment.
Anna Nash, of UCL, who is responsible for “planetary protection” for the project said: “Everything goes through a seven-step solvent clean. We use sterile swabs to swab everything down. We then send off the equipment to a separate lab and incubate for three days to see if there is any bacterial growth. If you have a situation where a tool is dropped on the floor, that has to be sent for cleaning which can take a week.”
Later this month the rover will be shipped to Airbus in Toulouse for a series of mechanical vibration and thermal tests to ensure it can survive the bumpy launch conditions as well as the frozen nights on Mars, where temperatures dip to -150C (-238F) before rising to 20C (68F), in the day.