In 2022, NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers and China’s Zhurong rover will be accompanied by another Martian explorer: The ESA and Roscosmos’s ExoMars rover dubbed Rosalind Franklin. The European Space Agency recently released a video showing its parachute drop test for ExoMars. The video shows how the spacecraft will slow down before landing on Mars.
“The ExoMars team have performed important parachute drop tests as crucial preparation for a safe touchdown on Mars in 2023,” ESA wrote. “The European Rosalind Franklin rover will search for signs of past life beneath the surface of Mars with its unique two-meter drill and onboard laboratory. The Russian surface science platform Kazachok will study the environment at the landing site. Landing on Mars is always a challenging endeavour and all possible parameters are taken into account.”
Tow-part landing system designed
The parachute packs several elements, so the testing was done on both the first stage supersonic parachute and the second main stage subsonic parachute. The first stage slows the spacecraft, while the second stage deploys once the spacecraft is moving below the speed of sound.
The two-part system is important because the Martian atmosphere is just 1% of the density of Earth’s atmosphere, and the parachute will have to work extra hard to slow down the spacecraft as it gets closer to the ground. After the parachutes, a propulsion system slows the craft further before it lands softly on the Martian soil.
Landing location at lower elevation
“Going to Mars is quite an adventure, and it took us quite some time to select the most appropriate landing site on Mars,” said Thierry Blancquart, the ExoMars team leader. “It took us five years, actually, to find a place that would be both scientifically interesting, where we could potentially find some traces of past life, and also it had to be a safe area for landing.”
The spacecraft is planned to land on an area called Oxia Planum, which is lower in elevation than much of Mars. It also means that the spacecraft will have more time to slow down while moving through the atmosphere.
