The ramps that will lead the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover onto the martian surface have proved they can handle freezing temperatures, vibrations and low pressure ahead of their mission to the Red Planet.

For nearly two weeks, the aluminium ramps sat inside a vacuum chamber in an airless environment at around –70°C. This was not a passive test – the engineers triggered a bolt to release the ramps, deploying their three-metre-length in full, rails included. Watch the deployment and the team's excitement here.

These ramps are critical for the rover to drive down from the landing platform onto the surface. After travelling folded across millions of kilometres from Earth, their deployment will be one of the mission’s most nerve-racking moments following touchdown on Mars in 2030.

On Mars, temperatures average a chilly –55°C, and the air is so thin that surface pressure is less than 1% of what we experience on Earth. To make sure the hardware will cope, the team ran thermal-vacuum tests replicating these extremes.

To simulate the chill of empty space, cold liquid nitrogen ran through the walls of the vacuum chamber while pumps drew almost all the air out of the sealed metal box, creating an environment that helps engineers spot possible design flaws before launch.

These stress tests, carried out at Criotec facilities in Italy, followed a vibration campaign at Airbus’s Integrated Technology Centre in Germany last June. The vibration tests mimicked the intense shaking the ExoMars spacecraft will experience during launch in 2028.

A consortium of European companies is behind the mission’s landing capabilities. While Polish space company Astronika designed the egress subsystem, Airbus built the landing platform. Thales Alenia Space is the ExoMars prime contractor.