Russia’s loss is UK’s gain for Mars Rover infrared spectrometer

With the Mars Rover aiming to launch in 2028, a key instrument for the £10m Rosalind Franklin Mars Rover will now be built in the UK, not Russia.

The Space Minister Andrew Griffith has announced that a UK team has been awarded £10m to replace Russian components in the rover, which will be searching for signs of life on the Red Planet.

Specifically, the new funding will allow a team – led by the University of Aberystwyth – to build the Infrared Spectrometer for ExoMars (ISEM) so that the mission can recover its full scientific potential.

The project, funded with an additional £10.7 million from the UK Space Agency and led by Aberystwyth University, will involve

The Welsh university will work with the same team based at University College London’s (UCL)’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory that led on designing and building the rover’s panoramic camera system, PanCam. The system will identify minerals, enabling the rover to drill for samples to be analysed by other instruments on board.

The instrument has been named Enfys, which means ‘rainbow’ in Welsh.

“It is exciting to enhance the scientific power of PanCam’s wide angle and high resolution visible cameras with improved mineral identification in the infrared thanks to Enfys,” said Professor Andrew Coates (Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL), Principal Investigator of PanCam on the Rosalind Franklin rover. “Our team are delighted to apply the experience from PanCam to Enfys, for the challenging environment of the Mars surface. We look forward to joint science and operations with Enfys.”

PanCam is pictured below.

“We learned a lot during the development and testing of PanCam and it is a privilege to be leading the fantastic team of people who will put that knowledge into practice once again to develop a new instrument for the mission,” said Dr Matt Gunn of Aberystwyth University, the Principal Investigator on Enfys.

Dr Gunn is is pictured top with the new infrared spectrometer being developed, along with a full size model of the Rosalind Franklin rover at Aberystwyth University.

Built in UK

Note that the rover (pictured) has already been built by Airbus, in Stevenage, for the European Space Agency programme . It was due to launch in 2022 before collaboration with Russia’s space agency was cancelled following the illegal invasion of Ukraine.

“The UK-built Rosalind Franklin rover is a truly world-leading piece of technology at the frontier of space exploration,” said Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, Dr Paul Bate. “It is fantastic that experts from the UK can also provide a key instrument for this mission, using UK Space Agency funding.

“As well as boosting world-class UK space technology to further our understanding of Mars and its potential to host life, this extra funding will strengthen collaboration across the fast-growing UK space sector and economy.”

The latest announcement brings the total Government investment in the Rosalind Franklin, through the UK Space Agency, to £377 million, highlighted the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

The rover was originally planned to launch in September 2022 from Kazakhstan, but the Ukraine-Russian war has intervened.