The engineers hope their work will be incorporated into a robot vehicle called ExoMars which the European Space Agency will launch to the Red Planet in 2011.
Roughly the size of a go-kart, the Astrium chassis is a gleaming six-wheeled device that embodies Europe's best hope so far of making a landing on Mars, and of unearthing evidence to answer the generations-old question, "was or is there life up there?"
Of course, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were hyped as part of NASA's "search for life on Mars" despite a conspicuous lack of any life detection science packages. We can only hope the Astrium, being built by the ESA, might actually carry the proper tools for the job.
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