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The company’s Stevenage site is leading the rover project, part of the Mars Sample Return campaign from Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Nasa’s 2020 Mars rover mission Perseverance will collect Martian soils and rock samples and leave them on the surface in small metal tubes. After that, the plan is for Nasa to launch the ESA Sample Fetch Rover to collect the tubes.
Landing in 2028, the rover will travel an average of 200m a day over six months to find and pick up the samples. It will collect up to 36 tubes, carry them back to the lander and place them in a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will launch them into orbit around Mars. Another spacecraft developed by ESA with a Nasa payload, the Earth Return Orbiter, will collect the samples from Martian orbit and return them to Earth.
The initial studies for the Sample Fetch Rover have been underway at Airbus in Stevenage since July 2018. The team has developed sophisticated algorithms for spotting the sample tubes on the Martian surface, and a dedicated robotic arm with a grasping unit to pick up the tubes is being designed with a pool of European industries.
The Sample Fetch Rover will have four wheels, larger than the six flexible wheels on the ExoMars Rover but reducing mass and complexity. The type, size and number of wheels was chosen to better cope with the selected landing site terrain, and with the speed and performance required to reach the depot location and return the samples in due time to the lander.
The wheels present challenges as the rover has to move quicker than ExoMars but not get stuck on its journey. It will be required to travel more than 15km across the surface, finding and collecting up to 36 of the 43 sample tubes left by the Perseverance rover. The samples are due to land back on Earth in 2031.
“This is an exciting opportunity for the UK space sector to play a leading role in humanity’s efforts to return the first samples from Mars. Airbus has a rich heritage of designing challenging space missions in the UK, from the Solar Orbiter probe to the Rosalind Franklin Mars rover,” said UK Space Agency chief executive Graham Turnock.
“The government has made clear its ambitions for space and we are working hard to develop a new national space strategy to bring long-term strategic and commercial benefits to the UK, while strengthening our international partnerships through ESA and beyond.”
In November 2019 the UK committed £180m to ESA’s global exploration programme to ensure UK industry plays a leading role in the mission to bring back the first samples from Mars and support NASA’s ambitions to return humans to the Moon.
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