Mars Express Extended, Mars Express Orbiter gets a lease Options

[Guest_Myran_*]

Mars Express Orbiter gets a lease of life, the mission have been extended one Martian year (23 months) from early December 2005.

[bobik]

Extended life for ESA's science missions

[...] ESA's Science Programme Committee (SPC) has confirmed the continued operations of ten scientific missions in the Agency's fleet. [...] The decision was taken during the SPC meeting in Antwerp, Belgium, on 7 March. [...]

The extension of three ESA-led missions, Cluster, Integral and Mars Express, all of which have been operational since over 20 years, were in jeopardy financially, as two new major missions (JUICE and Euclid) will be joining the fleet of missions in operations this year. For all three missions, ESA received strong and well-justified requests from the scientific community to extend the missions. ESA’s scientific advisory structure (the Astronomy Working Group, the Solar System Exploration Working Group, and the Space Science Advisory Committee) reviewed the science cases and supported further limited extensions. Thanks to some significant programmatic risks (related to JUICE and Euclid) having recently been retired, the SPC agreed to extend these three missions for a limited amount of time, using part of the Programme contingency in the years 2023-2025. [...]

The science operations of Mars Express are extended until end of 2026 and the SPC also approved the indicative extension of Mars Express from 1 January 2027 to 31 December 2028, enabling support to the JAXA-led Mars Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. This will be followed by two years of post-operations; the extension to 2028 will be reviewed in 2025/2026, after MMX launch and arrival at Mars. [...]

Yahoo!!!