As everyone knows, the ExoMars mission, the first stage of which took place in October this year, turned out to be a partial failure: the Schiaparelli model crashed on the surface of the Red Planet. However, today it became known that this did not affect the plans of the European Space Agency to launch the second phase of the mission, as well as a number of other projects, in 2020.
Despite the failure of the Schiaparelli module test run, the European Space Agency announced that the ExoMars 2020 mission will proceed as planned. In total, the project received 10.3 billion euros for a wide range of tasks to be solved over the next ten years. Despite the fact that the amount is more than impressive, ExoMars requested even more - 11 billion, which means that in some places specialists will have to shrink their costs. The most notable internal project was the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM), whose main goal was to study a near-Earth asteroid in detail, but did not receive support from members of the government.
However, the mission's main objective, a flight to Mars, received the green light. Like the first time, a rover will be sent to the Red Planet, which will be able to drill soil to a depth of two meters, in search of traces of life. Recall that the first stage of the program took place in October this year, and during its implementation the Trace Gas Orbiter successfully reached the atmosphere of Mars. But the Schiaparelli module, which he carried on board, suffered a very sad fate: due to errors in the software calculations, Schiaparelli mistakenly decided that he had landed (although there were still a few kilometers to the surface), after which he turned off the brake engines and fell like a stone crashing on Mars.
Since Schiaparelli was able to transmit data during the landing on the TGO, ESA engineers believe they can avoid a similar setback in 2020. Of course, the mistake has undermined investor confidence: because of this, some of the funds will now come from the general budget of the European Space Agency. and this means that there may not be enough money for other projects. Despite this, the director of the ESA science department, Alvaro Jimenez Cañete, assures reporters that the rest of the space projects will be launched on time. Among them are the Cheops mission aimed at studying exoplanets, the BepiColombo probe, which will fly to Mercury, the Solar Orbiter and the Euclid dark energy mission, the details of which have not yet been disclosed.
Vasily Makarov