Paris (AFP)

The ExoMars mission is facing a persistent problem with its parachute system, which could prevent it from leaving for the red planet in the summer of 2020 if it is not resolved quickly, the European Space Agency (ESA) acknowledged. ).

Prepared by Space Europe and Russia, this ambitious and delicate mission plans to send a European mobile robot to Mars to drill the Martian soil and try to find signs of past life on the red planet. Russia supplies the launcher, the descent module (with European elements including the parachutes) and the landing platform.

The mission is to be launched by a Russian Proton rocket between 25 July and 13 August 2020. The landing on Mars is scheduled for March 2021.

A race against the clock is engaged to hold the launch window because the essential system of parachutes is still not developed. The red planet has a very tenuous atmosphere and the landing gear braking system must be very efficient.

A test in early August on the largest of the four parachutes to allow the smooth arrival of the robot and the landing module on the Martian surface failed, said ESA on its website.

Another test conducted at the end of May on all four parachutes (two main and two small ones used to deploy the large ones) had also been a failure. Worn by a stratospheric balloon at 29 km altitude over northern Sweden, the parachutes were deployed but the sails of the two main parachutes had been torn.

After reworking the design, the ESA teams tested again on August 5th the largest parachute, 35 meters in diameter. The first stages of deployment were normal but the sail suffered damage even before the opening of the parachute. And a line broke.

- "Two matches" -

"All the team is mobilized to win the race against the clock," said Francois Spoto, head of the ExoMars program, at the end of a working meeting on Wednesday.

Engineers will research the causes of this persistent anomaly on the parachute system manufactured by Italian companies, French and British in particular.

"We have two matches left," says the head of the program pictorially. The first will be scraped during the next test to be conducted at high altitude "in November / December", above Oregon (USA). "If this match is pschitt, we will not have time" to be ready for the important April 2020 review of the ExoMars mission.

If it goes well, there will be a "second match" to scratch, for another test in February.

"We are doomed to succeed both," says Spoto. "But there is no reason to panic too much." One thing is clear: "we can only launch something that works," he says.

So far, the United States is the only country that has successfully operated robots on Mars. ESA experts will be consulting with their Nasa colleagues at a workshop in the fall.

In October 2016, as part of the first part of the ExoMars mission, Europe failed to land a landing demonstrator named Schiaparelli. Following contradictory information that misled the on-board software, the craft crashed to the surface after a free fall at high speed. On the other hand, the European TGO spacecraft was successfully placed in orbit.

"Going to Mars and in particular landing on Mars is very difficult," recalls François Spoto. And the launch windows to the red planet only open every two years, because of the orbits of Mars and the Earth.

© 2019 AFP