Britain’s Mars rover project abandoned at cost of £22.7m

A BRITISH-BUILT rover, which was due to collect Mars samples to return to Earth, has been scrapped by Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa), despite already costing Britain £22.7million.

Engineers at Airbus in Stevenage, Herts, have spent four years designing the rover, which was to form a critical part of the Mars Sample Return mission.

The mission is aiming to bring back soil and rock from Mars in the 2030s for study on Earth, in a project which may prove definitively that life once existed on the Red Planet.

But at a press conference yesterday, Nasa and Esa said they were cancelling the project, and instead would repurpose the Perseverance rover, which is already on Mars, to collect the samples.

They are also sending two new helicopters as a backup, which will be scrambled if Perseverance runs out of power and is forced to abandon its load.

A contingency cache of Martian samples will also be left in the nearby Jezero crater for the helicopters to collect in the event of a complete Perseverance failure, in which the tubes become trapped inside the rover.

Although Nasa said the change of plan came following a re-evaluation of the lifespan of Perseverance, The Daily Telegraph understands Nasa and Esa have been forced to make drastic spending cuts after Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, pulled out of several missions because of the Ukraine war.

A spokesman for Airbus said: “We are very disappointed that after all the hard work on developing the Mars Sample Fetch Rover that the programme has been cancelled… Airbus is determined to ensure this surface mobility capability, that could also be used on the Moon, is maintained for the UK space sector.”