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The next mission to Mars

Alok Jha

The most advanced attempt to find life on the red planet

London: The human obsession with Mars goes on: British scientists have unveiled a robot vehicle that will, in five years, lead the most advanced attempt to find life on the seemingly barren red planet.

The vehicle, the size of a snooker table, is a prototype lander for the European ExoMars project, and will be able to move across the Martian surface, acting as a surrogate for scientists on the earth. Using sophisticated digital cameras, it will detect targets of scientific interest and explore them in greater detail — without the need for constant supervision.

But ExoMars represents more than just the cutting edge in Martian exploration. European politicians are so taken by it that they are falling over themselves to fund it. In a pleasant surprise for the normally cash-strapped space science community, pledges of money from European governments have exceeded the required 600 million euros for the project, prompting scientists to consider adding new instruments and experiments to the project.

"The over-subscription goes up to 650 million euros," said Bruno Gardini of the European Space Agency (ESA). The biggest proposed change on the table is to convert the space probe that will take the lander to Mars into a working science laboratory. An orbiting space lab would allow scientists to add up to 30 kg of extra experiments raising the cost of ExoMars to 775 million euros. Several countries — including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom — have expressed an interest in extending the remit of the project.

ExoMars will be Europe's first lander on Mars since Beagle 2, which was dropped on the red planet by the Mars Express spacecraft in 2003. Unfortunately, Beagle 2 never made contact with the earth, and its fate is still unknown. ExoMars follows on from the successful Huygens lander, a European probe dropped last year by the Cassini spacecraft on Titan, a moon of Saturn. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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