European Space Agency cuts back on Mars rover mission plan

A rover set to explore Mars in seven years will lack a major piece of monitoring equipment because of a budget squeeze, an official from the European Space Agency said Tuesday.

The ExoMars rover scheduled to land on the Red Planet's surface in 2016 will not have a Humboldt landing tray — a payload containing a number of instruments designed to study the planet's weather and seismic activity. Researchers had hoped the Humboldt could be left on the planet's surface to study Mars' geophysics and environment.

The loss of the Humboldt was inevitable, ESA's director general, Jean-Jacques Dordain, told the BBC. He cited the space agency's commitment to the European Union to keep the mission budget to around 850 million euros.

But the removal of the Humboldt also makes life easier for engineers who were concerned that the additional equipment might push the weight of the rover to a precarious level, Dordain told BBC in an interview at the Paris Air Show.

NASA-ESA partnership

Dordain said the United States would now likely play a significant role in the 2016 mission.

Budgetary woes have hobbled the ambitions of both ESA and its U.S. counterpart, NASA, to the extent that the two have seriously explored a partnership for future missions to Mars.

In May, NASA space sciences chief Ed Weiler said he believed a partnership with ESA was the best avenue to pursue shared science goals "if we can lose a little bit of our ego and nationalism."

While international pairings are nothing new, they tend to be more common on deep space missions. With Mars, however, NASA has kept a do-it-yourself attitude while letting other countries add instruments to NASA spacecraft for their own data-gathering.

That NASA and the Europeans are considering pooling resources reflects a budget reality — it has become too expensive for one nation to pay to go to Mars alone, especially with the long-term goal of returning Martian rocks and soil to Earth estimated to cost at least $5 billion US.

A NASA presentation to the Mars science community in March indicated that the two space agencies would likely take turns being the leader.

As Marcello Coradini of the European agency has put it: "In terms of willingness, we all agree that we have to work together. The discussion is not on the 'if,' it's on the 'how' we work together."

Details of this union could come by the end of the month.