The European Space Agency's (ESA) Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) has successfully completed its Platform Critical Design Review (P-CDR), a crucial milestone in the mission to bring the first Mars samples back to Earth. The review, conducted with the involvement of European industry and NASA, validated the performance, quality, and reliability of the spacecraft's systems.
Credit: ESA
“European industry is ready for the next chapter. A robust design is the foundation for building, testing and assembling the hardware into a complete spacecraft,” says Tiago Loureiro, ERO’s project team leader.“The configuration of the spacecraft is robust enough to be flexible with the cargo and to help finding solutions for a new architecture. ESA and our industrial partners adapted to a new scenario, staying inventive and resourceful while remaining a reliable partner for NASA,” explains Tiago.
First solar array panel for ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter (ERO). The seven-tonne, seven-metre tall spacecraft would be equipped with 144 m² of solar arrays and nearly 40 000 individual solar cells spanning nearly 40 metres – the largest ever built for interplanetary flight. Credit:ESA
The ERO is ESA's major contribution to the Mars Sample Return campaign, a complex mission that will involve a choreographed sequence of events to retrieve Martian rock, soil, and atmospheric samples. “This mission exemplifies European technological prowess at its finest. From a staggering distance of up to several hundred million kilometres, Earth-based teams will choreograph a complex orbital dance around Mars,” says Orson Sutherland, ESA’s Mars programme manager. The spacecraft's platform is designed to capture a basketball-sized capsule filled with samples collected by NASA's Perseverance rover, and its robust design ensures flexibility and adaptability for various mission scenarios.
Earth Return Orbiter infographic Credit: ESA
The successful review enables the manufacturing and testing of the spacecraft's components to begin, ensuring the mission stays on track for launch. European industry is playing a significant role in the mission, with suppliers from 11 countries contributing to the building of the orbiter. ERO will be the largest spacecraft ever built for interplanetary flight. Contributions come from France, Italy, Germany, UK, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Romania, and The Netherlands. Airbus Defence and Space has overall responsibility for the ERO mission to build the spacecraft and to conduct mission analysis from France, Germany and the UK. Thales Alenia Space will play an important role in assembling the spacecraft, developing the communication system and providing the orbit insertion module from its plant in Turin, Italy.
The ERO's five-year mission will not only retrieve samples from Mars but also serve as a communication relay for rovers and landers on the surface. The spacecraft's design leverages European expertise in autonomous navigation, rendezvous, and docking, built up over decades through missions like the Automated Transfer Vehicle and JUICE.
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