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.
Quite effective material, thank you for the article.
ReplyDelete