ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover: The Mars Mission That Drills for Life 2 Metres Underground — and It Just Practiced Leaving the Lander

The surface of Mars is a UV sterilisation chamber. Ultraviolet radiation and harsh oxidising chemicals shred organic molecules before any instrument can read them. Every rover ever sent to Mars has scratched the surface — literally — and found a desert of radiation-blasted rock.

One rover, sitting in a European clean room right now, was built to go somewhere none of them could. Much deeper. And today, it took a step closer to Mars.

A structural twin of the Rosalind Franklin rover quietly rehearsed something that sounds routine but took years to engineer: rolling off its lander and taking its first drive. Not on Mars. In a test facility. But this moment is a milestone in a mission that has been waiting — fully built, scientifically ready — while a war on Earth cancelled its rocket.

What is the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover?

ExoMars Rosalind Franklin is the European Space Agency's first Mars rover — designed from the ground up to search for signs of ancient life underground. Its drill reaches two metres below the Martian surface. That is deeper than any Mars mission before it, by a significant margin.

It is named after Rosalind Franklin, the British crystallographer whose X-ray diffraction work was essential to discovering DNA's double-helix structure — and who died in 1958, before the Nobel Prize could reach her.

The mission carries a scientific instrument suite called the Pasteur payload, including MOMA — the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer. MOMA analyses the material the drill brings up, hunting for molecular signatures that only life produces. No instrument like it has ever operated on Mars.

Why does drilling deeper matter for finding life on Mars?

Mars has no global magnetic field strong enough to shield its surface. No thick ozone layer either. UV radiation pours in and reacts with perchlorates in the soil to create a harsh chemical environment that destroys organic molecules near the surface.

Go down a metre or two, and those forces cannot follow. Ancient organics, shielded by metres of rock, could still be preserved down there — frozen in Martian time, undisturbed for billions of years. The question Rosalind Franklin was built to answer: are any of those molecules biological in origin?

Curiosity and Perseverance can abrade rock surfaces and analyse dust. That is enormously valuable. But two metres down is a different world entirely. No rover has ever been there. The ExoMars mission is, in a real sense, an unexplored frontier on a planet we have been exploring for decades.

You can read about the science of planetary exploration on SkyLens Learn.

Why has the ExoMars mission been delayed for so long?

This is where Earth politics enter a Mars story.

ExoMars was originally a joint ESA and Roscosmos programme. Russia would provide the Proton rocket, the Kazachok lander, and scientific instruments. European and Russian engineers had worked together for years.

Then the parachutes failed. Not once. Repeatedly. High-altitude drop tests showed dangerous instability that could destroy the lander on descent. The 2018 launch was pushed to 2020. The 2020 launch was pushed to 2022. COVID compounded the delays. Engineers worked to certify a design that would actually work.

Then, on 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. ESA suspended all cooperation with Roscosmos within days. The launch window for 2022 was cancelled. A mission a decade in the making lost its rocket, its lander, and its launch date in a matter of weeks.

The rover was already fully assembled. It was moved to storage. Ready. Going nowhere.

What is the new plan for ExoMars?

ESA did not abandon the mission. The agency has been engineering an entirely new lander — new architecture, new hardware, without any of the Russian components. NASA joined the effort, providing expertise and support. The target is a launch in the late 2020s, though the exact date depends on successfully completing the lander redesign.

Mars and Earth only align for a viable launch window every 26 months. The planetary mechanics are unforgiving. Miss a window, and you wait two years. The team has a very limited number of chances.

That is what makes today's egress rehearsal significant. Before a rover can do any science on Mars, it has to exit its lander cleanly — wheels down, instruments intact. That sequence must be proven on Earth, under simulated conditions, before anyone bets the entire mission on it at 200 million kilometres from the nearest engineer.

Where will the Rosalind Franklin rover land on Mars?

Oxia Planum. A broad, flat ancient terrain near Mars's equator. The rocks there formed approximately 3.5 billion years ago — during the Noachian period, when Mars had liquid water on its surface and possibly a denser atmosphere.

Clay minerals have been detected at Oxia Planum from orbit. Clay forms in the sustained presence of liquid water. If ancient Mars was ever hospitable to microbial life, places like Oxia Planum are where that life would have existed. And if any chemical traces survived underground, shielded from radiation by metres of rock, the subsurface at Oxia Planum is a serious candidate for finding them.

Could the ExoMars rover actually find signs of life on Mars?

Scientists are very careful about this — and they should be.

If MOMA detects organic molecules in samples drilled from two metres below the surface, that would be an extraordinary finding. But organic molecules can arrive via meteorites. Abiotic chemistry — chemistry with no biological involvement — can produce them too. A detection would be the beginning of an investigation, not the end of one.

However: if the molecules show structural patterns specifically associated with biology — chirality, for instance, or a complexity that abiotic chemistry struggles to explain — the conversation changes fundamentally. ESA scientists describe this mission as the best-equipped search for life ever attempted on Mars. That is not a promise. It is an honest assessment of what going two metres deeper actually means.

Read about other ongoing searches for life across the solar system in the SkyLens blog.

What can we learn from Beagle 2 — Europe's first Mars lander?

In 2003, the UK's Beagle 2 lander arrived at Mars on Christmas Day. Contact was never established. The mission was declared lost.

In 2015, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter finally found it. The lander had reached the surface — but two of its four solar panel petals had failed to open fully. The antenna was blocked. A single mechanical failure ended the mission before a single science reading was taken.

ESA absorbed that lesson. The egress rehearsal happening today — a rover twin rolling off its lander platform in a test facility — is a direct consequence of Beagle 2. Every mechanical sequence, every deployment step, every wheel movement is rehearsed and verified on Earth. Because there is no repair crew at 200 million kilometres.

A rover named after a scientist overlooked in her own lifetime. Carrying instruments designed to answer whether Earth is the only place life has ever existed. Fully assembled. Scientifically ready. Waiting for the engineering — and the orbital mechanics — to align.

When Rosalind Franklin finally rolls off a real lander onto real Martian soil, it will be among the most watched sequences in the history of exploration. Every minute of rehearsal happening right now is building toward that moment.