video The European Space Agency (ESA) conducted a successful parachute test for the ExoMars Mars landing rover earlier this month, even as uncertainty looms over US involvement in the project.

The parachutes, which are designed to slow the descent of the ExoMars lander, have caused more than a few headaches for the development team. In 2019, a drop of the 35m parachute from about 35km up resulted in a test failure. There were concerns that further setbacks would delay the mission, but as it turned out, the parachutes didn’t hold things up – the system was successfully qualified in 2021. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, did.

ESA suspended the mission as it rethought its plans without Roscosmos’ involvement.

In 2024, ESA and NASA inked an agreement to get the long-delayed Rosalind Franklin rover to the red planet. Then, Trump took office, and the proposed NASA budget cuts made it uncertain whether the space agency could contribute as planned. Most recently, the US Senate Committee on Appropriations offered hope, restoring “not less than $73,900,000” for the mission [PDF] – just slightly less than the cost of moving the Space Shuttle between museums.

So testing the parachutes was a welcome distraction from the wrangling over the mission’s future. The Register understands that the activity had long been planned and budgeted for outside of whatever squabbling might be happening in the US.

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The test dropped a dummy ExoMars descent module from an altitude of almost 30 km, and its parachutes were successfully deployed.

There are two main parachutes: a first stage that is 15m wide, and a variant of the parachute used for the successful ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The second is a 35m monster – and will be the largest parachute ever to open over Mars.

“Using two parachutes allows us to design a strong, medium-sized parachute to decelerate the probe through supersonic speeds and then a much larger, lightweight parachute for the final descent,” said John Underwood, principal engineer at Vorticity, the UK company entrusted with parachute design and test analysis.

While the parachutes will scrub off a considerable amount of velocity, retro-rockets will be fired 20 seconds before touching down in order to avoid creating a surprise crater on the surface. Nobody needs another Schiaparelli incident.

The successful test took place at the Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, northern Sweden, on 7 July.

Luca Ferracina, ESA’s system engineer for the ExoMars landing module, said, “We are running this campaign to confirm our readiness for Mars, and to verify that the parachutes are still performing as expected after the long storage.”

The move is a prudent one, and one that we fervently hope is a precursor to this mission, which one space agency insider called “snakebit,” will finally reach Mars. It would be a shame if the closest the carefully crafted ExoMars parachute system got to the red planet was almost 30km above the Arctic Circle. ®