Exomars

With the invasion of Ukraine severing its cooperations with Russia's Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA) is now considering alternatives to get its ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars without Russian support hardware.

The war in Ukraine is having an interplanetary impact. Deteriorating relations between Russia and Europe mean the joint ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars rover mission faces a launch delay that could set back its Red Planet landing by at least two years.

A huge deposit of water has been discovered on Mars in a formation often called its Grand Canyon. The Trace Gas Orbiter has detected an area the size of the Netherlands where water could make up as much as 40 percent of the material near the surface.

Europe's ExoMars mission has suffered a setback and will not launch until 2022. The mission has been pushed back from its 2020 launch date due to the need for further component testing and the disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Organic compounds have been discovered on Mars in recent years. A new study examines the different ways that one type in particular, thiophene, may have formed, and intriguingly one of the most plausible scenarios involves ancient microbial life.

Science stands still for no one, and with a new year comes a new calendar of exciting events in spaceflight and exploration. New Atlas rounds up some of the most important milestones to look forward to in 2020.

Has life ever existed on Mars? Humankind has sent more than a dozen spacecraft to investigate, with some built to dig into the surface and others to roam its dusty terrain. The ExoMars 2020 mission will be the first to do both.

ESA's Rosalind Franklin ExoMars 2020 Mars rover is off to France for environmental and launch testing.

ESA's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover has received its full suite of instruments that it will use to seek out signs of past or present life on the Red Planet.

​​A joint venture between the ESA and Roscosmos to place a rover and science platform on Mars has hit a stumbling block, with the parachutes needed to safely lower the ExoMars 2020 module to the surface receiving damage during the latest round of testing.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has made a map of the distribution of watery minerals in the Martian surface, studied how the global dust storm affected the atmosphere, and intriguingly found very little methane, which calls into question the results of a study just last week.

The landing craft that will deliver Europe's first rover to the planet Mars has arrived for assembly and testing in Turin, Italy, and has been officially named. A key component of the ExoMars 2020 mission, the Roscosmos landing platform has been christened "Kazachok" (Cossack).