The ‘space freighter’ will receive huge solar panels of a total of 144 square meters for the return ticket of more than 100 million kilometers, so that the probe’s wingspan will be approximately 39 meters.
The construction of the probe is part of a large, multi-billion dollar project by the European and American space agencies ESA and NASA. That starts tomorrow with the launch of the American rover Perseverance.
One of the tasks of the Perseverance is to collect tubes with soil samples and leave them in strategic places on the surface of the red planet. A new rover will then be launched around 2025: the Sample Fetch Rover, in which Airbus is also involved. He will collect the tubes and take them to a launch pad. In a special container, the size of a basketball, the monsters are brought into orbit around Mars. The Earth Return Orbiter picks them up there.
In this NOS animation with images from NASA and ESA you can see how the mega operation works:
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