What if the clearest clues about life on Mars are not on the surface at all, but hidden a couple of meters underground where radiation cannot easily reach them? That is the bet behind Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover, now officially back on track for a 2028 launch thanks to abn new partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency.
Under a memorandum of understanding signed in Paris in May 2024, NASA will secure a commercial United States rocket for the mission and supply key parts of the propulsion system that must slow the spacecraft during its descent to Mars.
The agency will also provide small nuclear heater units to keep the rover warm during frigid martian nights.
ESA, for its part, is steering the overall mission and still calls it its most ambitious attempt yet to search for past and even present life on the Red Planet. If schedules hold, the spacecraft will launch in 2028 and land in 2030.
A deep drill into Mars’s buried history
Rosalind Franklin will be the first Mars rover able to drill down about two meters beneath the surface. From that depth it will pull up samples that have been shielded from the harsh temperature swings and intense radiation that constantly bathe the top layer of martian soil. Inside the rover, a miniature laboratory and theMars Organic Molecule Analyzer instrument will search those samples for organic molecules and other potential biosignatures that could point to ancient microbial life.
ESA officials stress that the surface itself is a poor place to look for delicate chemistry. In an earlier interview, agency director general Josef Aschbacher noted that there is “no chance to find life on the surface” and that “you have to go down” to where organics might have survived.
A mission rebuilt after war and budget cuts
The road to this point has been anything but smooth. ExoMars began more than a decade ago with NASA as a major partner, only for the agency to step back after budget pressures in the early 2010s. Russia’s Roscosmos then joined, providing the launch and a landing platform, and the rover was fully assembled and ready to fly in 2022.
The invasion of Ukraine changed everything. ESA member states halted cooperation with Russia, and a mission that was essentially flight ready lost its rocket and its way to the surface, forcing a delay to the next suitable launch window late in the decade.
Rather than scrap the rover, Europe chose to rewire the entire project. NASA’s renewed role, built on decades of landing and operating robots like Curiosity and Perseverance, is now central to that redesign.
Nicola Fox, who leads NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, called Rosalind Franklin’s drill and onboard lab an effort with “outstanding scientific value for humanity’s search for evidence of past life on Mars.”
Tiny nuclear heaters and European know how
Surviving on Mars is an energy puzzle. Solar panels must power the rover by day, but at night the temperature plunges far below anything your home heating system could handle. Lightweight radioisotope heater units from NASA and the United States Department of Energy will sit next to sensitive electronics and slowly release heat, helping the rover ride out deep freezes without draining its batteries.
Europe is also working on its own radioisotope technology under the GSTP ENDURE program in the United Kingdom, aiming to have an independent heat and power capability by the end of the decade. That means Rosalind Franklin is not only a science mission, it is also a test bed for future European exploration hardware that could one day head to the outer solar system.
A UK-built landing platform and a promising site
To replace the canceled Russian lander, ESA has selected Airbus teams in the United Kingdom to design and build a new European landing platform.
The contract, worth about 150 million pounds, covers the landing structure, a powerful propulsion system to slow the craft to under three meters per second just before touchdown, and the ramps that will let the rover roll safely onto martian soil. When it finally drives away from that platform, Rosalind Franklin will become the first European built rover to operate on Mars.
The target is Oxia Planum, a clay rich region where ancient rivers and floods once deposited thick layers of sediment. Recent studies of the area have mapped rockfalls and layered clays that may expose fresher material from below the surface, potentially increasing the chances of finding preserved organic molecules when the rover starts drilling.
What Mars can tell us about planetary climates
For planetary scientists and exobiologists, Rosalind Franklin is more than a robot explorer. It is a way to read Mars’s long environmental history. Research linked to the mission suggests that clay-rich regions near the landing zone record a time when liquid water was abundant and the climate was dramatically different from today’s cold, dry world.
One scientist described Mars as “a model for what the early Earth could have looked like,” since its ancient rocks remain in place instead of being recycled by plate tectonics.
In practical terms, that means every drilled core from Oxia Planum is a tiny environmental archive. Understanding when Mars lost its water and how its atmosphere thinned helps researchers test ideas about long-term climate change on rocky planets, including our own.
For now, the rover waits in clean rooms on Earth while engineers finalize the new lander and NASA teams line up a rocket. If all the pieces come together, the next decade could finally tell us whether Mars once hosted microbes in its buried clays or whether the planet’s story is one of lifeless dust. When those samples are pulled from the martian subsurface, the real question will be simple: what, if anything, still whispers of life inside them?
The official press release on this mission was published on the European Space Agency’s website.
