A team of engineers and scientists has brought a machine from the future to the Tabernas desert in Almería, Spain. In a landscape familiar to fans of Sergio Leone westerns, before the sun had truly warmed the ground, they lifted Charlie onto a small cart — the prototype rover that the European Space Agency (ESA), Airbus, and much of European industry and science have been designing for years. They took it to an area that alternated between very fine dusty soil, rocky scree and salt-encrusted ground. They wanted to test how the machine would cope in an environment as close as possible to Mars. That is the ultimate goal of the ExoMars mission to which it belongs: to reach the Martian surface in 2030 — after more than a year of space travel — with the first European rover to touch down there, and drill into it in search of past or present life on the red planet. At least in the dry Almería scrub, Charlie seems to have convinced the scientists.

Seguir leyendo