ESA - European Space Agency

Before anything touches Mars, it has to be extremely clean 🧽

Our Mars chief engineer Albert Haldemann explains how one of the parachutes for the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission is sterilised and why it matters more than you might think.

Carefully wrapped inside a donut-shaped bag, the 35-metre parachute was “baked” in a specialised dry-heat steriliser. The parachute needs to be at least 10 000 times cleaner than your smartphone.

Inside the cleanroom, air is constantly and everyone entering has to gown up more rigorously than in a hospital operating theatre, then pass through an air shower to remove any trace of contamination.

The 74 kg parachute, will one day deploy in the thin Martian atmosphere, slowing the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover during its descent. It will be the largest parachute ever flown to Mars, or anywhere else beyond Earth.

The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission will launch in 2028 and spend over 25 months travelling to the Red Planet where it will search for signs of life beneath the martian surface.

The potential existence of past and perhaps even present-day life on Mars requires rigorous sterilisation, to make sure that no microbes piggyback their way there from Earth. Any terrestrial microbes hardy enough to survive the ride through space could interfere with the investigation by causing ‘forward contamination’ and triggering a false positive.
 
 
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🎞️ ESA
📸 ESA-SJM Photography