On 30 September last year, the European Space Agency’s comet-chasing “Rosetta” mission executed what director general Jan Woerner describes as a “planned suicide”, literally spewing out one last blast of data by crashing into the comet it had been tracking since May 2014. Quite apart from its effect on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, Rosetta – named after the hieroglyphics-translating stone – was a real ground-breaker and no mean technical feat. It took 10 years from launch for the car-sized spacecraft to close on and intercept 67P, beyond Jupiter, and then stick by for two and a half years as it hurtled towards, around and away from the Sun. En route, it unleashed a small lander, whose mini-mission was a qualified success despite an over-hard landing.
Also ground-breaking and spectacular, albeit less successful, was the first half of ESA’s ExoMars mission. After a seven-month flight to Mars, the Trace Gas Orbiter satellite lined itself up for what should be years of atmospheric data sampling. A stationary lander – named Schiaparelli, after the 19th Century Italian astronomer Giovanni, who mapped the planet’s surface features – crashed hard, leaving a crater big enough to be photographed from orbit.
So, never let it be said that the ESA isn’t making an impact. But wrapping up 2016 and previewing 2017 at ESA headquarters in Paris on 19 January, Woerner emphasised that Schiaparelli, which was designed to test technology for entry, descent and landing – very difficult in Mars’s thin atmosphere – and then survive, on battery power, for just a few days to support a science payload, was by no means a total loss. The crash occurred on 19 October and teams on the ground are still analysing the event. The theory so far is that the onboard computer jettisoned the parachute and switched off the thrusters in response to a “negative” altitude value – as one would do if one believed oneself to be below the surface. Gyros, not software, look to be the culprit. In any case, Trace Gas Orbiter did its job, transmitting lander data back to Earth “perfectly”.
Before France's Thomas Pesquet went outside in January Europe had committed to staying inside the ISS programme
NASA
In preparing for the 2020 half of the mission, which will put a rover with deep drilling gear on the surface, lessons learned from Schiaparelli will be invaluable. Its loss, he says, is a “sad situation”; a crash-landing in 2020, on the other hand, really would be a “disaster”.
Meanwhile, he notes, ESA has solid experience with touching down on other worlds. Rosetta’s Philae landing was hugely challenging and a more-than-partial success. The January 2005 landing of ESA’s Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan – released from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which is only now approaching the end of its mission to Saturn – was a genuine triumph and, still, the farthest-ever landing from Earth.
But while ExoMars promises to tell us a great deal about the Red Planet – and the again-literally ground-breaking ability to drill down 2m (6.5ft) should tap soil samples which, if any, will hold evidence of past or present life – it is already telling us quite a lot about life on Earth, or at least in Europe. First, European governments, however cash-strapped they may be, clearly value the science coming out of Mars and the European industrial ecosystem which makes it possible. When ministers from ESA member state governments met in Lucerne, Switzerland at the beginning of December to hash out ESA’s budget and priorities for the next several years, their closing resolution urged ESA to “strive to reap the benefits expected from the significant investments made in the ExoMars programme” and stressed “the importance for the director general to implement thoroughly the ExoMars plan of action”.
And, the ministers went on, the ESA director general should “define future missions in the domain of robotic and human exploration, such as a Mars sample return mission as a possible project".
For his part, Woerner – the former head of Germany’s DLR aerospace agency, who joined ESA in 2015 on the retirement of France’s Jean-Jacques Dordain – took the occasion of his 2017 January press briefing to underscore a more immediate highlight of ExoMars. Its March 2016 launch, by a Russian Proton rocket, showed “that co-operation beyond Earthly crisis is still working". The extent of Earthly crisis between Europe and Russia is well-enough known and nothing new, however heated of late, and Woerner is right to hold up ExoMars as an example of how things can be different.
The programme dates to early-2000s European concepts for Mars exploration, but looked to have been seriously derailed when, in 2011, a cash-strapped NASA had to drop out. With it went the launch, but Roscosmos soon stepped in with Proton rides for both segments and some scientific payloads. Then, with the TGO-Schiaparelli mission already in deep space, the 2018 follow-up wobbled, over cost worries and concerns that the hardware wouldn’t be ready in time. The 2018 launch was pushed back to 2020 – Mars and Earth are at their closest every two years. For now, Woerner is confident that all will be ready for 2020, pointing to monthly engineering teleconferences with Russian colleagues. With a clear “go” and clear expectations from ESA member states, he can at least press forward with the confidence of a long-term budget and political support. In as much as success breeds success, ExoMars is a measure of Europe-Russia collaboration in space. While Mars beckons, ESA is supporting Russia’s Luna 27 and 28 robotic missions to the Moon, which could lift off this decade.
BREXIT?
Earthly worries, though, are many – or more typically, are money. Given the background of economic pressure and political upheaval, ESA’s budget-setting ministerial council meeting in Lucerne in December offered an opportunity for cash-strapped member states to rein in the space agency. Woerner summed this up well in his post-meeting blog post, headlined: “Success, tinged with a bit of disappointment”. In it, he described discussions as “lively”. Indeed, while he understandably welcomed the council’s backing of the “United Space in Europe” strategic vision he has advocated since taking office, he added: “It immediately became clear that the real focus of the discussions would be the subscriptions, the amounts committed to the different programmes.” That is, money. “Exhausting meetings,” he continued, “conducted both day and night [were dominated by] tactical manoeuvres…while issues of national affordability were never far from the surface.
“Subscriptions were announced and then withdrawn again [but] in the end, more than €10.3 billion ($11 billion) was put on the table, constituting a major success overall.”
That €10.3 billion for programmes, running in some cases to 2025, may represent only a nominal increase on the €10.1 billion pledged at the last full ministerial meeting in 2012. But, ESA’s total 2017 budget, revealed last month, stands at €5.75 billion including contributions from the EU and the Eumetsat weather service – nearly 10% up on 2016. Speaking in Paris of the programmes budget, Woerner said he reckons that ESA can meet all its commitments if inflation stays low; if inflation rises, he added, it will be necessary to talk about money.
Lucerne also saw ministers make a big vote of confidence in what is probably ESA’s most visible programme, the International Space Station. There was little likelihood that Europe would have dropped out of the programme when its current commitment ends in 2020, but partners USA, Russia, Canada and Japan had already committed to extend through 2024, when when the biggest artificial satellite will, finally, be de-orbited.
The disappointment at Lucerne came in the financial door being “slammed shut” on a proposed Asteroid Impact Mission, which would have been part of a joint NASA-ESA project to evaluate technologies for altering the flight path of a tiny asteroid. “It was an example of ESA at its absolute best: daring, innovative and ambitious all at once,” wrote a clearly disappointed Woerner, who added that the project – asteroid protection falls under the broad category of so-called “space situational awareness” or “planetary defence” – is a “necessity…[so] I will try to find a way back in through a window again. It is simply too important.”
Stephane Corvaja /ESA
A rising contribution was particularly welcome from one particular ESA member state: the UK. At Lucerne, Britain pledged €1.4 billion over the coming five years, up from the €1.2 billion it signed for at the 2012 ministerial in Naples. That translates into a yearly programmes contribution of €280 million, up from €240 million; as UK universities and science minister Jo Johnson put it at the time: “We are committed to ensuring the UK remains at the forefront of new technologies, science and daring space exploration.” And, he added: “Our sustained investment…will ensure we build on the strengths of the UK’s growing space industry.”
So far, then, no sign of a Brexit-bound UK matching its imminent withdrawal from the EU with a pull-back from ESA. In Paris, Woerner noted that ESA is an intergovernmental organisation with links to the EU, but it is not part of the EU (full members include Norway and Switzerland, and Canada is an associate), and that the relationship with the UK is a matter of “very big importance”, and the focus of much hard work.
Across the Atlantic, president Barack Obama’s NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, resigned on 20 January as the Trump administration took charge. In Paris a few days before that, Woerner simply observed that a new government means a new NASA administrator, but ESA had met with the Trump transition team to ensure the ESA-NASA partnership carries on. In December, Woerner spoke in Washington DC to outline the results of the Lucerne ministerial meeting, and he says it is “clear” that the NASA transition people see ESA as a “reliable partner”. ESA, in any case, is supplying the service modules for the first two flights of NASA’s Orion deep-space-capable crew capsule, starting in 2018, and hopes that supply relationship will continue beyond the first flights.
NEXT ON THE AGENDA
Ultimately, ESA’s position looks sound enough to ride out the ups and downs of top-line budgets and adjustments of political priorities, both in Europe and internationally among its peers. In Europe, the longstanding position of large nations – Germany, France and Italy, and increasingly the UK, Spain and others – and the European Commission in Brussels is that space is of strategic importance, with major benefits for industry and economies, and quality of life. In Paris, Woerner spoke of ESA’s battery of Sentinel Earth observation satellites and their provision of better information to scientists and the public following the recent earthquakes in Italy: “This is a typical example of where space comes down to everyone on Earth.”
It is also a longstanding position that, for strategic economic and security reasons, Europe must maintain independent access to space and independent control of satellite navigation technology. So, major programmes like the Ariane and Vega launcher development initiatives and Galileo satellite navigation constellation can be assumed to be secure.
Internationally, ESA holds an unusual position among space agencies. It is Europe’s habit to operate through multinational partnerships and collaborations, and that natural role as a facilitator helps projects like the International Space Station . If a human journey to Mars is ever to really happen, for example, it is widely assumed that for reasons of cost, technical competence and politics, it would have to be an international affair, even though NASA – owing to it having the biggest budget and the most inter-planetary experience – would lead. At the 2014 ILA air show in Berlin, Bolden made this point rather clearly – in a debate with peers including Dordain and Woerner, then head of DLR, he noted that while he might be the “boss”, Dordain was the “dean”.
Woerner is, perhaps, taking that role even further. He has long talked of the world entering a new phase of the industrial revolution, in which people are moving beyond merely accepting technology that is chosen for them to expecting that they will have a say in choosing what technology is developed. One of his early initiatives was an ambitious “citizens’ debate on space for Europe”, which on 10 September 2016 convened meetings of 50 or 100 people – aged 15 to 89 and chosen to represent a cross-section of their societies – in each ESA member state to discuss topics like science, space exploration or space debris management. Woerner describes the discussions as “very intensive”, turning up results showing a strong belief that space is good for humanity (91% agree). Around 80% agree that space should be a source of commerce, industry and economic development, that space should be protected from pollution and harmful human activity and that space should be exploited for natural resources.
Such citizen involvement may be just beginning, and clearly throws up some contradictions. But the idea that an agency like ESA should make a conscious effort to make plans and set priorities with direct input from its ultimate stakeholders – citizens – is compelling in an age of revolution, as evidenced in Brexit, Trump and perhaps other surprises to come.
Woerner, anyway, likes to emphasise what he calls a “new paradigm” in space. ESA was founded in 1975, he notes, to be a single European space organisation; this has been a source of continuity, but everything is achieved through programmes. Historically, those programmes are decided by governments and executed by ESA, the recent ministerial conference in Lucerne demonstrating the model. Europe has its own multinational character, but that government-driven top-down approach to space is familiar to Americans through NASA. Now, however, there are new pressures on budgets and new actors, new technologies and new motivations.
As a result, he says, space is changing; ESA today is not just a driver, it is a facilitator. Woerner made headlines early in his tenure at ESA by advocating what he calls a “Moon village”; not necessarily a permanent base, but some physical or support infrastructure that could help realise ambitions – from public or private sector participants far beyond those who can be involved in the International Space Station – to do work on the Moon: astronomy, say, or mining, or even astronaut visits. The Moon village, he says, is not a programme and it has no budget and no plans – but it is a fact, because ESA has been approached about possible projects.
Back down on Earth, another reality of the new paradigm is the public-private partnership, which is more than just a way to get private sector money to pay for public space projects. ESA, says Woerner, is often asked to support entrepreneurs not with money but with knowledge – just the sort of shifting of roles which fits the new space paradigm.
Even in the realm of science, there is scope for adaptation to this new world. Space situational awareness, or planetary defence – that realm which Woerner considers “too important” to ignore but which, for budget reasons, is stalled – could conceivably be one application. The ESA convention dictates that scientific priorities are defined by scientists, and that would naturally include, say, a mission to survey space for potential-threat asteroids. But ESA, he says, is looking at ways to adapt if private alternatives are offered. Indeed, he says, if a good idea came from outside, “the door would immediately open”.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
