The European Space Agency suspends its mission to Mars due to sanctions on Russia

The invasion of Ukraine has left the first important scientific project in the ditch: the ExoMars mission.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has just suspended its mission to Mars, which was to be carried out in collaboration with the Russian Roscosmos, in coherence with the sanctions that are being imposed on this country.

The mission was going to take off in September aboard a Russian rocket in the direction of the neighboring planet to study with a

the existence of Martian life in the past.

ESA, however, leaves the door open for this mission to be carried out if it gets other partners to replace Roscosmos.

The ESA Governing Council, meeting in Paris, confesses "the current impossibility" of carrying out the mission together with Roscosmos and bases its rejection on "the tragic consequences of the aggression against Ukraine", as seen in the obligation to “suspend cooperation activities”.

Although it regrets the impact it will have on the scientific exploration of space, "ESA is fully aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia by its member states," defends the European agency.

"We have made a difficult but necessary decision to suspend the launch of ExoMars scheduled for September with Roscosmos and study options to move forward," ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher summarized on Twitter.

Astronaut Tim Peake next to a prototype of the Rosalind Franklin 'rover'. BEN STANSALL (AFP)

Refusing to collaborate with the Russians from Roscosmos, which provided its Proton rockets for the launch, Aschbacher is going to prepare "an accelerated industrial study to better define the options available to implement the

ExoMars

This four-wheeled articulated robot (named

in honor of the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA) has as a scientific priority discovering if life ever existed on Mars, "one of the biggest scientific questions of our time".

The ExoMars mission had already been delayed for two years in 2020 due to the impossibility of guaranteeing a safe landing.

In addition, after Roscomos decided to remove all its personnel (almost 90 people) from the French Guiana cosmodrome, ESA also assumes that all missions that had Russian Soyuz rockets for their launch are paralyzed.

This departure from Roscomos came in response to the sanctions that began to hit Moscow after Russia invaded Ukraine.

From that moment, there was an escalation of tension in the field of space exploration.

The person in charge of Roscosmos, Dimitri Rogozin, even raised the possibility that the International Space Station (ISS) would rush towards Earth.

The ISS, the most expensive scientific facility in history, has seven astronauts on board and it is the Russian module that is responsible for generating impulses that prevent its fall into the Earth's atmosphere.

The ESA assures that everything on the ISS continues as normal and that its main objective is to guarantee safety.

Two weeks ago, the European agency already warned that they would "fully deploy the sanctions imposed on Russia" by its 22 member states, including Spain.

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