Europa’s Earth Return Orbiter reaches design maturity

The critical design review for the space shuttle platform ended today with the involvement of European industry and NASA.

A critical design review is one of the most important stages in any space flight project to make a spacecraft a reality. The Platform Critical Design Review (P-CDR) confirmed the performance, quality and reliability of the systems for this unprecedented mission to Mars.

The Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) is ESA’s main contribution to the Mars Sample Return campaign, a complex choreography of missions to bring samples of Martian rock, soil and atmosphere back to Earth.

Europe ready for Mars

Design validation and technical details represent a formal step towards the integration phase.

“The European industry is ready for the next chapter. A solid design is the basis for building, testing and assembling equipment into a complete spacecraft,” says Tiago Loureiro, ERO project team leader.

Manufacturing and testing of spacecraft components can now begin to ensure the mission goes ahead for launch.

Suppliers from 11 European countries are on board to build parts of an orbiter set for a full round trip from Earth to Mars.

CHALLENGE

NASA announced plans to update the Mars Sample Return program last April with reduced complexity, risk and cost, including innovative designs and proven technology to return valuable samples from Mars to Earth.

ESA technical teams worked closely with their NASA counterparts to prepare for a review of the program.

“The spacecraft configuration is robust enough to be flexible with the payload and to help find solutions for a new architecture. ESA and our industrial partners adapted to a new scenario, staying inventive and agile while remaining a reliable partner for NASA,” explains Tiago.

“We have confirmed that the Earth Return Orbiter does what it was designed to do and more, regardless of the alternatives,” he adds.

witchcraft

The Earth Return Orbiter has the essential role of bringing samples from Mars to Earth, but before it can do so, it must locate them in space.

ERO’s design demonstrated with flying colors that it is capable of capturing a basketball-sized capsule filled with samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

“This mission illustrates European technological capabilities at their best. From a staggering distance up to several hundred million kilometers, Earth-based teams will choreograph a complex orbital dance around Mars,” says Orson Sutherland, ESA’s Mars program manager.

Their challenge: to locate a small capsule, maneuver it into the correct rendezvous orbit and successfully capture it – all while operating remotely in the vast expanse of space.

ERO’s five-year mission to Mars and back will also see the spacecraft act as a communications relay with rovers and landers on the surface.

European excellence

The teams in Europe rely on already mature technologies in autonomous navigation, rendezvous and connectivity, expertise built up over decades from missions such as the Automated Transfer Vehicle and Europe’s first mission to Jupiter with JUICE. Knowledge from the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover’s mission to the Red Planet is also feeding into it.

ERO will be the largest spacecraft ever built for interplanetary flight. Contributions come from France, Italy, Germany, UK, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Romania and the Netherlands.

Airbus Defense and Space has overall responsibility for the ERO mission to build the spacecraft and perform mission analysis from France, Germany and the UK. Thales Alenia Space will play an important role in assembling the spacecraft, developing the communication system and providing the orbit insertion module from its factory in Turin, Italy.