Exomars Mission - Two Spacecrafts reach Mars Tomorrow

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Tomorrow, two spacecraft will reach Mars after nearly seven months of traveling together through space — and they’ll both attempt to pull off two separate and incredible feats. One will put itself into orbit around the Red Planet, while the other will land on the surface, hopefully in one piece.

THE BIGGEST MOMENT SO FAR IN THE FIRST PHASE OF THE EXOMARS MISSION

It’s perhaps the biggest moment so far in the first phase of the ExoMars mission, a joint venture between the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency, or Roscosmos. On Sunday, the two vehicles — the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Schiaparelli lander — separated from one another in preparation for Wednesday’s events.

The main goal of ExoMars is to figure out if there is, or ever was, life on Mars. The TGO will try to answer this question from orbit, by sniffing out the gases in Mars’ atmosphere. It’ll be looking for specific compounds like methane, which on Earth is often produced when biological matter breaks down. Its presence around Mars could indicate life on the planet’s surface, as well. Researchers have long debated whether or not the gas exists around the Red Planet, and the ExoMars mission hopes to finally quell that dispute.
More here:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13304632/exomars-mission-schiaparelli-lander-orbiter-mars-landing-plan-esa

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@edgarblythe,

I'm looking forward to this. But I'm really anticipating the results of the TGO, which unfortunately won't even begin until 2018.

TGO Insertion occurs tomorrow, but then it takes almost 2 years for the aero-braking to slow the craft down to speed before the scientific portion of its mission can even begin.

Hopefully the TGO will provide key information required to determine whether the Methane plumes are of biological origin or clathrate origin.

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It's cool that they named one of them Schiaparelli--he was the Italian astronomer who, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, mapped the albedo features of Mars. A lot of it was skewed because he didn't have a telescope to match what we have today, but his names have remained. He was an astronomer, but he was a scholar of ancient literatures, too. So he named features he saw with names from antiquity, and most are in Latin. My favorite name is the Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyinth of Night. He identified many hydrological flow features, which was poo-pooed at the time, but which was confirmed subsequently. He called them channels. Unfortunately, the Italian word for channels is canali, and thanks to English language journalists--the bottom feeders of the literary world--canals on Mars nonsense proliferated for decades.

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I should note that the presence of methane probably would indicate life.

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I am just happy they are getting this far within my lifetime. Imagine all the neat stuff we would have missed if we had been born a hundred years earlier.

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@edgarblythe,

edgarblythe wrote:

I am just happy they are getting this far within my lifetime. Imagine all the neat stuff we would have missed if we had been born a hundred years earlier.

Yeah but the cool stuff we will learn and the technology to play with a hundred years from now. The people in 2116 will be saying, "Im so glad I didnt live back in 2016, it must have really sucked for them back then."

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@Krumple,

Move the marker all you like. I am relatively satisfied.

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@edgarblythe,

The European space lander touched down on Mars a couple of minutes ago.

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@Walter Hinteler,

A signal from the European-Russian ExoMars space craft has arrived at Mission Control at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany. The response from Lander Schiaparelli is not very strong however.

More >here<

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Keeping fingers crossed.

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At least the TGO is inserted. That's the one with the most important part of the science mission anyway.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

The European space lander touched down on Mars a couple of minutes ago.

I think the last signal they got was that the chute had deployed. Have they received anything after that?

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@rosborne979,

Seems they got more, 20GB of data until now, I've just heard
https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanSpaceAgency
They want to get all data from the radio signal until midnight (here) and hope to have decoded until tomorrow morning.

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@Walter Hinteler,

The discussion comments on that page don't make it sound too good. Oh well, just have to wait and see I guess.

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@rosborne979,

I've watched it on tv ... they really said too often that it just is a test

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

I've watched it on tv ... they really said too often that it just is a test

What is just a test? The Schiaparelli probe itself?

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I think this is something which the other space agencies (other than NASA) are obsessed about. NASA currently has two active rovers on Mars. Russian rover missions have had dismal results. But it's silly to get an attitude about this--everyone's Mars missions have been hit or miss, mostly miss, and that includes Mars. The greatest successes of NASA have been orbital missions. If NASA has been more successful, it's largely because of the repeated attempts over the last 50 plus years.

It's all good, the various space agencies are learning valuable lessons going to Mars. To put people on Mars, we'll need to have frist-class, reliable AIs to make the orbital insertion. The orbital insertion window for Mars is way too small for a human pilot to hit it right. Even the machines which have attempted to do an MOI have had less than stellar success. Good luck to the ESA and the Schiaparelli probe.

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@Setanta,

As of this morning, scientists are still not certain whether a space lander that reached Mars on Wednesday touched down on the Red Planet in good working condition. (According to ESA in Darmstadt, 10:00 h CEST)

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Wow!!!!! Oh wow!

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My interpretation based on what I'm reading here: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37715202 is that Schiaparelli has crashed (and probably completely destroyed by the impact).

My guess is that this was a software glitch which mis-interpreted the atmospheric conditions and caused the chutes to detach prematurely, which probably cascaded into more out-of-sequence data which further caused the retro rockets to drop out early. The result would have been a high impact crash.

On the bright side, they say you learn more from your mistakes than your successes, so they may have learned a lot from this. Smile

Quote:

Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday.
Telemetry data recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early.
The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time.
The European Space Agency (Esa) has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive.
Experts will continue to analyse the data and they may also try to call out to Schiaparelli in the blind hope that it is actually sitting on the Red Planet intact.
In addition, the Americans will use one of their satellites at Mars to image the targeted landing zone to see if they can detect any hardware. Although, the chances are slim because the probe is small.
For the moment, all Esa has to work with is the relatively large volume of engineering data Schiaparelli managed to transmit back to the "mothership" that dropped it off at Mars - the Trace Gas Orbiter.

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Exomars Mission - Two Spacecrafts reach Mars Tomorrow

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