BREMEN, Germany — NASA will help Europe get its long-delayed Mars life-hunting ExoMars rover off the ground, even though President Donald Trump’s proposed NASA budget cuts the collaboration in a drive to reduce spending on science.
The announcement was made at the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) Ministerial Council — a high-level meeting of the agency’s 23 member states — on Wednesday (Nov. 25).
The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover is a 660-pound (300 kilograms) Mars exploration robot fitted with a 6.6-foot (2 meters) drill to search for signs of life below the Red Planet’s radiation-battered surface.
The project, conceived in the early 2000s, has faced multiple setbacks on the way to the launch pad. The mission was originally planned in cooperation with NASA, but the American agency withdrew in 2012 after budget cuts imposed by the Obama administration, forcing ESA to seek support from Russia.
The rover, which is named after a British chemist who played a key role in discovering the structure of DNA, was supposed to lift off atop a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in September 2022 and descend to the Martian surface atop a Russian-made landing platform a year later. But that plan changed in early 2022: ESA severed ties with the Russian space agency Roscosmos in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
NASA then came back into the picture. In late 2022, ESA member states agreed to invest an additional 360 million Euros ($417 million US) to build a new landing platform for the rover. NASA offered to provide a rocket, radioisotope heaters needed to protect the rover’s technologies in the frigid Martian weather, and braking retrorockets to safely lower the landing platform to the ground. With new developments needed, ESA established a new launch date for the rover in 2028.
But Donald Trump’s election victory last year nearly thwarted those plans, as Rosalind Franklin was among 20 science collaborations between ESA and NASA that Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal eliminated. Since then, speculation has swirled about whether ESA would have to seek additional funding to complete the mission on its own. The NASA contribution to ExoMars is estimated at $375 million, according to the nonprofit space exploration advocacy group Planetary Society.
Speaking at the ESA Ministerial Council, Aschbacher confirmed that NASA will provide all of the three elements it had previously committed to.
“These confirmations have been given to us in writing, so this is a very important step,” Aschbacher said.
He added that NASA had already delivered a science instrument to be carried by Rosalind Franklin — the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer-Mass Spectrometer (MOMA-MS), which will be able to detect the tiniest traces of organic materials in the samples drilled up by the rover. The instrument, ESA’s spokesperson said, is currently undergoing integration, testing and verification in Europe.
ExoMars is only one of Europe’s flagship science space missions caught in the NASA budget drama. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) gravitational wave observatory comprising three innovative spacecraft is a joint project worth an estimated $3 billion. NASA was to provide about $1 billion worth of technology for the mission, including onboard telescopes and lasers, according to the Planetary Society. The Venus exploration probe EnVision also relies on NASA’s help. The American agency was supposed to build an innovative synthetic aperture radar instrument worth an estimated $300 million. That contribution has also been cut by the Trump administration.
Further planned missions, including the X-Ray telescope New Athena and exoplanet watcher Ariel, will be hit if the Trump budget proposal is approved. Both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, however, are working to reinstate at least some of that funding. ESA member states will be negotiating ESA’s future direction and funding on Nov. 26 and Nov. 27, not knowing how the situation in the U.S. will resolve.
Earlier, a source familiar with the situation inside ESA told Space.com that the agency is working on a rescue plan for LISA and EnVision and believes that Europe could go it alone if need be.
“We are discussing with our member states about their ambition to take responsibility for one or more of the NASA elements should we need to take recovery actions,” the source said. “By the middle of next year, we expect to be in a position to decide on the way forward, with clarity on NASA funding and member state ambition and funding.”
Aschbacher previously unveiled bold plans to secure a record-breaking budget of over 22 billion Euros ($25 billion) for ESA’s next three-year period, up 5 billion from the last budget agreed in 2022. The negotiations, however, come in a tense time period for Europe with countries pressed to increase their defense spending due to worsening tensions with Russia.
