Rosalind Franklin finally gets a ride
Europe's drilling rover has missed three launch windows and lost its Russian lander. It now flies in October 2028 on an American rocket, for Oxia Planum in 2030.
The rover has existed as finished hardware since 2019. It has never left Earth. Rosalind Franklin was built to launch in 2018, slipped to 2020 when European and Russian industrial work and payload deliveries ran late, and again to 2022 because the spacecraft still needed testing with its final hardware and software, on a schedule the pandemic then finished off. In March 2022, weeks before the stack was due to ship to Baikonur, ESA suspended the launch; in July the Council ended the cooperation with Roscosmos outright. That killed the mission, because the Russians were supplying the thing that was going to put it on the ground. The Kazachok descent module was theirs, and so were the braking engines for the final descent, the launcher, and the radioisotope heaters that keep the rover alive through the night.
ESA's ministerial council refunded the mission at the end of 2022 and the work since has been about rebuilding the bottom half. Thales Alenia Space in Turin remains industrial prime. In March 2025 Airbus was contracted to design and build a new European landing platform at Stevenage, where the rover itself was assembled — a deal the UK government put at £150 million. Under a memorandum signed with ESA in May 2024, NASA supplies the throttleable braking engines for the final descent, the radioisotope heater units, and the launch itself — so the rover will leave from the United States. On 16 April 2026 NASA named the vehicle: a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, flying from Kennedy Space Center.
The launch opportunity is October 2028, followed by an unusually long two-year cruise. ESA chose the slow route deliberately, to put the rover down with six months of work ahead of it before Mars' northern autumn, when the dust thickens and a global storm can kill a solar-powered mission. First data from Oxia Planum is expected in October 2030. Oxia is a wide, flat plain of iron-magnesium clays laid down more than 3.9 billion years ago and later covered — which is the point. The clays formed in water and then were sealed.
What makes this rover worth the wait is one instrument: a drill, built by Leonardo, that reaches two metres down. Curiosity scratches a few centimetres. Perseverance cores about seven. Galactic cosmic rays and the oxidising chemistry of the martian surface chew up organic molecules in the upper layers over geological time, and two metres gets below most of that. Viking found no organics in 1976, most likely because perchlorate in the soil burned them up inside the instrument. The samples go straight into an onboard laboratory that includes MOMA, whose mass spectrometer NASA supplies, designed to look for complex organics without cooking them first.
It is the only Mars mission currently funded and in build whose stated purpose is to look for signs of life. Whether it launches on time is a separate question, and the mission's record on that is poor.