The agreement will reinforce collaboration between the agencies on ventures relating to Mars, asteroids, the moon and beyond.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced a brand-new agreement yesterday (20 November).
It was signed by the ESA’s director general, Josef Aschbacher, and president of JAXA, Yamakawa Hiroshi, in Tsukuba, Ibaraki.
In a move to strengthen ties between the agencies, the new agreement proposes increased collaboration between the ESA and JAXA on missions to examine asteroids, the moon, Mars and more.
As part of the collaboration, the ESA and JAXA will work jointly on lunar exploration, including each agency’s contribution to NASA’s Artemis programme: the ESA’s Argonaut lunar cargo lander and JAXA’s pressurised lunar rover.
JAXA engineers will be able use the ESA’s recently opened lunar analogue facility to test lunar technologies on Earth, while the agreement will enable other endeavours such as coordinating commercially provided small lunar rovers, as well as the lunar polar exploration mission, and building on the ESA’s Moonlight programme to create a lunar communications and navigation service by putting a commercial constellation of satellites around the moon.
The agreement also outlined further cooperation between the two space agencies on the Gateway programme to create a crewed space station orbiting the moon; accelerated potential cooperation on the ESA’s Ramses mission to the asteroid Apophis; commitments to continue collaboration in tackling the climate crisis; and the exploration of commercial opportunities in low-Earth orbit.
The two agencies have also pledged to continue working together in projects concerning space science, including the ESA-led New Athena x-ray telescope for high-energy astrophysics, which is due to launch in 2037.
Both organisations have worked closely together in the past, having launched joint projects such as the BepiColombo mission to Mercury and the EarthCare/Hakuryu mission to study how clouds and aerosols affect the Earth’s climate.
NASA has also previously worked with the ESA and JAXA – in 2020, the three groups unveiled a tool designed to give researchers and policymakers access to planet-wide changes in the environment and human society following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mars mission proposed
The new agreement will also advance deliberations between the two agencies on a potential joint mission to Mars, which would involve sending small-lander missions to the red planet, building on technologies developed by the two agencies that include electric propulsion, and entry, descent and landing systems.
The ESA and JAXA will also explore possibilities for collaboration on the M-Matisse proposal to study the habitability of Mars, as well as the Plasma Observatory proposal to study the plasma around Earth. Both of these projects are under competitive study.
Lastly, the agreement also supports the continued dialogue relating to cooperation on bigger and long-term projects focused on the moons of giant planets and the JAXA-led LiteBird gravitational wave telescope.
The ESA has a total of 22 member states: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia are associate members.
In related European space news, The Exploration Company announced on Monday (18 November) that it had secured $160m in Series B funding to further its mission of developing reusable spacecraft.
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