The European Space Agency has definitively ended its collaboration with Russia on future lunar missions. They will no longer cooperate with Moscow’s Roscosmos space agency on the Luna 25, 26 or 27 science missions due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
This latest announcement comes almost a month after ESA also announced that it would officially suspend the Exomars mission, to send a rover to Mars, for the same reason. Formally known as ExoMars, the mission to send the Rosalind Franklin rover to the Red Planet was scheduled for September 2022 . The rover would ride on a Russian rocket and land on Mars eight months later using Russian hardware . The whole project now hangs in the balance. (At least, we will have to wait 26 months, if everything can be reoriented again).
“Following the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the ESA Director General has launched a comprehensive review of all activities currently carried out in cooperation with Russia and Ukraine,” ESA said in a statement. “The objective is to determine the possible consequences of this new geopolitical context for ESA’s programs and activities and to create a more resilient and robust space infrastructure for Europe . The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions imposed represent a fundamental change of circumstances and make it impossible for ESA to implement planned lunar cooperation.”
The statement also says that “ESA’s science and technology for these missions remain of vital importance” .
So ESA is trying to find new partners outside of Russia, such as the recently signed deal with the Japanese Space Agency, which will involve flying a mass spectrometer on Japan’s ISRO LUPEX lunar rover mission scheduled for 2024.
Reference: European Space Agency
