The European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Thursday that it will suspend cooperation with Russia's space agency Roscosmos on a joint Mars mission over the Russia-Ukraine conflict. 

The ExoMars mission had been set to use a Russian launcher later this year to send a European rover to drill for signs of life on the red planet.

However, the ESA said the conflict in Ukraine and sanctions against Moscow had forced it to cease cooperation with Russia and look for another way to launch ExoMars and four other missions using Russian rockets.

"While recognizing the impact on scientific exploration of space, ESA is fully aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia," the agency said in a statement on its website.

The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, called the decision a "shame."

"This is a very bitter (decision) for all the enthusiasts of space," Rogozin said on Telegram.

He said the project "would lose several years" but that Russia would "conduct this research expedition on our own." He added it would be done "without any 'European friends' with their tails tucked because of American shouting."

'Complex' and 'painful' to untangle the cooperation

European experts will now try and figure out how to do without the Russian technology that's woven into the mission. A heater that was meant to keep the rover from freezing on Mars is, for example, Russian. So, too, is the bulk of the mission's Kazachok landing platform, which means "little Cossack" in Russian. The largely European six-wheeled rover was meant to roll off that platform onto the Martian surface.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Josef Aschbacher, director general of the ESA, said the space agency will now sift "bit by bit and component by component" through the mission to determine how much time is needed "to really do it without the Russians." Alternatives might be sourced from Europe and with the help of NASA, he said.

"We need to untangle all this cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I can also tell you, but also a very complex one, and we have to do it," he said.

He described the breakdown of cooperation as "a wake up call" for Europe to further develop its own space technologies.

"We need to make sure that we have our independent access to space," he said.

Delay until at least 2026

The ExoMars mission had already been pushed back from 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for more tests on the spacecraft.

The mission was to have blasted off on a Russian Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan in September, and had been scheduled to land on Mars some nine months later.

Because of their respective orbits around the sun, Mars is only readily reachable from Earth every two years. The earliest next launch window would be 2024. But if sanctions on Russia haven't been lifted by then, enabling ESA cooperation with Roscosmos to resume, then that window could be missed, too.

The earliest a fully European or Europe-NASA version of the ExoMars rover could be launched would be 2026 or, failing that, 2028, Aschbacher said.

Already on Mars are NASA's Perseverance rover and China's first Mars rover, Zhurong, named after the Chinese god of fire. Both landed on the red planet last year. Two other NASA spacecraft are still active on the surface: Curiosity and InSight. 

(With input from agencies)