ESA holds talks on future of European space exploration
European stakeholders and the European Space Agency (ESA) met in Edinburgh, UK, on 8 and 9 January, to discuss possible scenarios for missions to the moon, Mars and near-Earth objects such as comets and asteroids. The debate took place as the ESA prepares its long-term European space exploration strategy, to be presented to the ESA Council at Ministerial level in the second half of 2008. 'We are at the beginning of a process to define and validate the direction the ESA will pursue in its space exploration strategy for the decades to come,' said Piero Messina, the ESA Director of Human Spaceflight, Microgravity and Exploration Programme. More than 170 scientists, politicians and representatives of the aerospace industry attended the two-day event in Edinburgh where Europe's collaboration with other nations in the search for a global space exploration strategy also featured on the agenda. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has already announced its goal of building a solar-powered base on the moon beginning in 2020. The base would be used as a staging post for manned missions to Mars. As for the ESA, its main objective is a Mars Sample Return mission, which would bring back Martian samples for analysis on Earth. To achieve this goal by the mid 2020s, several missions would need to take place to test the technology needed. According to Professor John Zarnecki of the UK's Open University, the scientific objectives of the European missions should focus on resolving questions such as where the building blocks for life on Earth came from; whether they evolved on our planet, or whether they came from an external body such as a meteorite. 'Asteroids are possible candidates for seeding the evolution of organic life on Earth,' Prof Zarnecki said. 'We need to go to an asteroid and collect some material, and bring it back to Earth.' Studying the composition of the moon could also shed light on the early evolution of the solar system, he added.