The European Space Agency (ESA) announced, last week, the various companies integrated in the ExoMars mission, a joint initiative with the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos). In this list that presents the industrial involvement in the project, six national entities mark their presence, all of whom are Cluster members:
- Active Space Technologies
- Critical Software
- Deimos
- GMV
- Frezite High Performance (FHP)
- Instituto Superior Técnico (IST)
To assemble the probe that will investigate Mars in 2022, it took more than a hundred companies from 22 different countries.
In the list of European countries involved (18 in total), Portugal is very well represented, only behind Germany, Spain, France, Holland, Italy, United Kingdom and Switzerland in the number of national companies that contribute to the mission.
The launch of this probe into space was scheduled for 2020, but the take-off was delayed and will happen in two years time. Meanwhile, NASA has already sent ‘Perserverance’ to Mars, a robotic vehicle that will also take samples of the rocks that are on the Red Planet’s surface. However, this ESA and Roscosmos probe launch, which will be the second part of the ExoMars mission, intends to go “deeper”, as it will look for signs of life at depths of up to two meters below the Martian surface.