* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: ExoMars mission

Blobrana · L

The US and European space agencies are to discuss the potential for mounting joint missions to Mars during a summit underway in Plymouth, UK.
Nasa's science chief Ed Weiler told BBC News that co-operation made sense given the agencies' shared science goals and the growing expense of such ventures.
America is now likely to play a major role in Europe's 2016 ExoMars mission.

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Blobrana · L

Europe's Mars mission scaled back
A major component of Europe's ExoMars rover mission is being dropped to contain costs.
The Exomars venture will launch a rover to the Red Planet in 2016, to search for signs of past or present life.
It was hoped a static science payload called Humboldt could also be put on the surface to study the weather and, for example, listen for "Marsquakes".
But agency officials announced at the Paris air show that financial constraints now made this impossible.

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Blobrana · L

A chemical process initially developed to study the biological environment on Mars could be used on Earth to help extract oil from tar sands.
The method, developed by researchers at Imperial College London, involves using extraction-helping materials called surfactants.
Imperial Earth science engineer Mark Sephton, one of the developers, said these surfactants were originally designed for use on ExoMars, Europe's next robotic mission with NASA in 2018, to liberate organic matter from rock on Mars.

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Blobrana · L

ExoMars

Blobrana · L

RE: ExoMars mission

Blobrana · L

Mars robots begin test campaign
UK engineers put the latest prototypes for a European Mars rover through their paces

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Blobrana · L

Has a wheel just come off Britain's participation in the biggest European space mission of the next decade?
Funding for UK-led experiments on the ExoMars rover and lander is to be cut by 25% in their key development phase.

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Blobrana · L

The wheels continue to turn on Europe's billion-euro project to put a robotic rover on the surface of the Red Planet.
Engineers working towards the flagship ExoMars mission have unveiled a sophisticated new vehicle prototype.
The demonstrator will test a possible suspension and locomotion set-up to be built into the final rover design.
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Blobrana · L

A new life-detecting instrument is preparing for a mission to the Red Planet. The Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector instrument, developed by a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, received approximately $2 million in NASA funding to further refine the design and technology for the European Space Agency's (ESA) 2013 ExoMars Rover Mission.
Named after the late Nobel Laureate and UC San Diego scholar Harold C. Urey, the Urey instrument will perform the first search for key classes of organic molecules in the Martian environment using state-of-the-art analytical methods at part-per-million sensitivities. This highly sensitive instrument is the first with the capability to effectively discriminate between Martian materials produced by biological and non-biological processes. In addition, the investigation will provide definitive oxidation characteristics of those same samples.

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