http://exploration.esa.int/mars/46124-mission-overview/
The European Space Agency is about to attempt to land a probe on Mars...
QuoteEXOMARS TRACE GAS ORBITER AND SCHIAPARELLI MISSION (2016)
The first mission of the ExoMars programme, scheduled to arrive at Mars in October 2016, consists of a Trace Gas Orbiter plus an entry, descent and landing demonstrator module, known as Schiaparelli. The main objectives of this mission are to search for evidence of methane and other trace atmospheric gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological processes and to test key technologies in preparation for ESA's contribution to subsequent missions to Mars.
ExoMars 2016: Trace Gas Orbiter and Schiaparelli. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
The Orbiter and Schiaparelli were launched together on 14 March 2016 on a Proton rocket and will fly to Mars in a composite configuration. By taking advantage of the positioning of Earth and Mars the cruise phase can be limited to about 7 months, with the pair arriving at Mars in October.
Three days before reaching the atmosphere of Mars, Schiaparelli will be ejected from the Orbiter towards the Red Planet. Schiaparelli will then coast towards its destination, enter the Martian atmosphere at 21 000 km/h, decelerate using aerobraking and a parachute, and then brake with the aid of a thruster system before landing on the surface of the planet.
From its coasting to Mars until its landing, Schiaparelli will communicate with the Orbiter. Once on the surface, the communications of Schiaparelli will be supported from Mars Express and from a NASA Relay Orbiter. The ExoMars Orbiter will be inserted into an elliptical orbit around Mars and then sweep through the atmosphere to finally settle into a circular, approximately 400-km altitude orbit ready to conduct its scientific mission.
(http://exploration.esa.int/science-e-media/img/5d/ExoMars2016_TGO_and_EDM_SideView_20150625_625.jpg)
(http://exploration.esa.int/science-e-media/img/78/ExoMars2016_DescentInfographic_20160223_625.jpg)
https://www.youtube.com/v/_qTiRYkGp9k
https://www.youtube.com/v/HZonfgIuhwc
May it have better luck than the Beagle.
http://www.seeker.com/europe-lander-exomars-mission-mars-life-2049523231.html
QuoteExoMars Lander Separates and Coasts to Red Planet
Piggyback-riding Schiaparelli spacecraft has successfully separated from the Trace Gas Orbiter mothership and prepares to land on Mars in 3 days.
The European Space Agency's Schiaparelli lander separated from its mothership on Sunday for a final, three-day solo journey to Mars.
Touchdown on the Red Planet, near where NASA's long-lived Opportunity rover is located, is targeted for 10:57 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, though it'll take nearly 10 minutes for radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, to reach Earth confirming a safe touchdown.
About 98 minutes before Schiaparelli lands, its mothership, known as Trace Gas Orbiter, or TGO, will begin firing its engine to shed speed so it can be captured by Mars' gravity and sling itself into orbit.
TGO and the piggyback riding Schiaparelli blasted off seven months ago on the first of a two-part European-Russian mission known as ExoMars. NASA also is contributing to the mission.
Flight controllers at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, had a few tense hours after Schiaparelli separated from the orbiter. Radio signals from TGO were missing key data about the spacecraft's status, ESA said.
A full telemetry link was restored at 2:42 p.m. EDT, ESA said, setting the stage for an engine burn later on Sunday to position the craft to put itself into orbit around Mars on Wednesday.
Schiaparelli will spend the next three days in hibernation to preserve its batteries. The lander, which will only operate for a few days, is designed to test procedures and equipment for a rover, due to launch in 2020, that will search for past or present-day life on Mars.
Quote from: spuwho on October 11, 2016, 03:43:33 PM
May it have better luck than the Beagle.
No signal yet... they know it entered the atmosphere... but...
Quote from: BridgeTroll on October 19, 2016, 12:47:53 PM
Quote from: spuwho on October 11, 2016, 03:43:33 PM
May it have better luck than the Beagle.
No signal yet... they know it entered the atmosphere... but...
7 Minutes of Terror. Curiosity responded and was vocal all through its landing. Given that, no signal probably means it's dead in water (sand). Damn.
SPLAT? :o
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/european-spacecraft-may-be-lost-on-mars/
QuoteEuropean Spacecraft May Be Lost on Mars
The Schiaparelli lander's failure to phone home has scientists fearing the worst
By Lee Billings on October 19, 2016
Mission controllers have yet to receive a signal from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Schiaparelli lander, a smart car–size spacecraft that attempted to touchdown on Mars on Wednesday.
"Absence of information is the worst thing you can have, because there's nothing you can do about it," says Andrea Accomazzo, an ESA project scientist speaking at a news conference in Darmstadt, Germany. "It's true that the data we have collected so far is not exactly nominal for Schiaparelli."
Schiaparelli's mother ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), successfully entered Martian orbit around the same time the lander began its descent, to begin a mission searching for signs of geologic or even biological activity in Mars's atmosphere. Together the lander and orbiter are part of the joint European-Russian ExoMars program.
At first the entry and descent appeared to be going well for Schiaparelli, which is named for the 19th-century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. Designed to demonstrate technology for depositing large payloads on Mars, the lander first would use a heat shield to bleed off the bulk of its 21,000 kilometers-per-hour entry speed as friction against the thin Martian air. Next it would deploy a parachute, followed by a radar-guided, rocket-controlled descent and a final two-meter free fall to the surface where impact would be cushioned by Schiaparelli's crushable, cushionlike underside. It would land within Meridiani Planum, an equatorial region on the same side of Mars that hosts NASA's Opportunity rover. All the while it would send out a simple, diagnostic radio tone so its progress could be monitored.
On Earth, listening stations picked up the signal and tracked Schiaparelli's descent to Mars—even seeing a fluctuation likely due to the lander's successful deployment of its parachutes. But a minute before it was set to reach the surface, when it was still hundreds of meters above Mars, Schiaparelli's radio signal abruptly fell silent. ESA's Mars Express spacecraft orbiting overhead was also watching Schiaparelli's radio signal, but a preliminary analysis of those observations has proved inconclusive beyond revealing the same sudden loss of signal. "We can't conclude the real status of [Schiaparelli] at the moment, but indeed it did enter the atmosphere and operate mostly [as expected]," said Don McCoy, ESA's ExoMars project manager, speaking at the press conference.
Jan Woerner, ESA's director general, tried to stay optimistic during his remarks, encouraging his audience to "Cross your fingers. I hope that we get a positive message very soon. ... The day is not over, and Mars is still there."
Soon, however, the optimism began to fade. Two hours after its scheduled landing, Schiaparelli was scheduled to establish two-way communication with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as the satellite passed over the planned touchdown site. But at a second, subsequent news conference ESA officials made no mention of this event.
Faced with what appear to be multiple failed attempts to detect or communicate with Schiaparelli, ESA officials are now contemplating the worst. Schiaparelli certainly landed on Mars but may not have survived to tell the tale. If it crashed it would join a long, distinguished list of previous failures—to date, more than half of the landing attempts on Mars have ended in catastrophe.
More certainty about the lander's fate—and a diagnosis of what went wrong—will not come until the ExoMars team has analyzed detailed telemetry data on Schiaparelli's descent, as recorded and transmitted by its mother ship, TGO. Those results are expected on October 20. Additional information could come from NASA's Opportunity rover, which attempted to photograph the lander as it deployed its parachute during the descent, but those images were not guaranteed—and if taken, they have yet to be transmitted to Earth.
Even if Schiaparelli did survive the landing, the mission's time is already running out. Because it was chiefly meant to demonstrate landing technology rather than perform science on the surface, the lander runs solely on chemical batteries that only contain a few days' worth of power. This would have been enough to operate Schiaparelli's small suite of instruments to study Mars's dust storms, atmosphere and electromagnetic field, but not much else.
For now, the ExoMars team still has much to celebrate. TGO's successful entry into Mars's orbit is a major achievement that will not only open a new window on the planet's atmosphere but also will shore up the dwindling orbital infrastructure there by acting as a vital communications link for current and future surface missions. One of those future missions will come from the ExoMars project itself, which intends to land a rover in 2021. Whether Schiaparelli's potential failure could alter or delay those plans remains to be seen.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-details-emerge-about-missing-mars-lander/
QuoteNew Details Emerge about Missing Mars Lander
The premature deployment or jettisoning of its heat shield and parachute may have doomed the Schiaparelli lander
By Megan Gannon, SPACE.com on October 20, 2016
After a suspenseful night waiting for a signal from the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, the European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed today that the spacecraft went silent less than a minute before it was set to reach the Martian surface Wednesday (Oct. 19).
ESA mission managers said this morning (Oct. 20) that they need more time to understand what went wrong with Schiaparelli, and to figure out exactly where and in what condition the test lander ended up. But the ExoMars team was optimistic that the capsule had collected enough data during its descent to set the stage for the next phase of the mission: the planned 2020 launch ofa life-hunting ExoMars rover.
"The test has yielded a huge amount of data," David Parker, ESA's director of human spaceflight and robotic exploration, said at a news conference early this morning. "It gives us a lot of confidence for the future. We need to understand what happened in the last few seconds before the planned landing, and that is likely to take some time."
Schiaparelli was scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet Wednesday at 10:48 a.m. EDT (1448 GMT). But the spacecraft's handlers could not confirm a successful landing, and were left waiting on a signal. Meanwhile, Schiaparelli's mother ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), successfully entered orbit around Mars.
Schiaparelli had been programmed to follow a demanding 6-minute landing sequence that would see the capsule come to a halt from about 13,000 mph (21,000 km/h).
The first phases of this sequence went according to plan, Andrea Accomazzo, head of ESA's solar and planetary missions, said at the news conference from ESA's operations center in Darmstadt, Germany.
The lander sailed through the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere as expected, and its supersonic parachute deployed on time—important indications that "the heat shield has worked flawlessly," Accomazzo said. But the ejection of the back heat shield and parachute occurred earlier than planned, he added.
"Following this phase, the lander has definitely not behaved exactly as we expected," Accomazzo said.
Schiaparelli was equipped with nine thrusters that were meant to bring the lander to a hover above the Martian surface so that the capsule could plop down from a height of about 6.5 feet (2 m). These thrusters, however, fired for only about 3 or 4 seconds—much shorter than mission managers had expected—and the spacecraft lost contact about 50 seconds before its planned landing, Accomazzo said. [The Best (and Worst) Mars Landings of All Time]
As to whether Schiaparelli is still in one piece, "It's very difficult to say a likelihood now," Accomazzo said.
"We are not in a position yet—but we will be—to determine the dynamic conditions with which the lander has touched the ground, and then we will know whether it could have survived structurally or not," Accomazzo said. "We are still processing the data from the descent. From the surface, we have no data at all."
He added that it might take some time for the team to locate the lander physically on the ground using imagery from an orbiter such as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
To date, NASA is the only space program to have completed fully successful missions to Mars' surface. The ExoMars team had hopes that their mission would be the first to pull off such a feat for Europe and Russia. (ExoMars is a joint mission by ESA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.)
Though it had some science experiments on board, Schiaparelli was meant to survive for only a few days on Mars, and its main purpose was to test the landing system that's intended to place a rover on the Red Planet as part of the second phase of the mission, ExoMars 2020. TGO, meanwhile, was designed to analyze the Martian atmosphere for gases such as methane, which could be evidence of life; the orbiter is also meant to serve as a communication link between the 2020 rover and Earth. [How the ExoMars Missions Work (Infographic)
"The very good news is that TGO is very successfully inserted into the orbit," said Jan Wörner, director general of ESA. "That means that TGO is now ready for science and, at the same time, ready for data relay, which we need for the 2020 mission."
Wörner said that after another review of the 2020 mission next week, ESA officials will know exactly how much they will have to ask each of the agency's member states to contribute to complete the funding for ExoMars. (The total amount of extra funding needed is on the order of 300 million euros, or about $329 million.) He and other ESA officials expressed confidence that Schiaparelli's bumpy finish wouldn't derail the next phase of the mission.
"All the key pieces of hardware were activated and provided data," Parker said. "The experience feeds into the next mission exactly as planned."
Mars is becoming a space junkyard it seems.
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/7266FAC3-DA45-4D32-A74ECEFDD236B966.png?w=590&h=393&98324C3D-B42F-4354-80497B5BB50FB00D)
QuoteCaptured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on October 20, this image reveals two new features on Mars likely produced by the crash-landing of the European Space Agency's Schiaparelli spacecraft. The rectangular box (and magnified inset at right) show a bright spot thought to be Schiaparelli's parachute, and a dark patch one kilometer to the north. The dark patch is thought to be the crater and scattered debris of Schiaparelli's impact with the surface at more than 300 kilometers per hour. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
This thing crashed very near the Opportunity rover... infact had you been standing there you would have seen the whole thing happen!
(http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/opportunity/20130607a/pia17070_br.jpg)
(http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/large_1x_/public/images/2016/10/schiaparelli_landing_site.jpg?itok=3OUc9_2H&fc=50,50)
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/mars-lander-crash-complicates-follow-rover-2020
QuoteMars lander crash complicates follow-up rover in 2020
By Daniel CleryOct. 25, 2016 , 3:45 PM
Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are racing to figure out what went wrong with the Schiaparelli Mars lander. On 19 October, it seemed to drop out of the sky and crash to the surface less than a minute before its planned soft landing. A diagnosis is urgent, because many of the same pieces of technology will be used to get a much bigger ExoMars rover down to the surface in 2020.
More than engineering is at stake. If the ExoMars 2020 rover is to fly at all, ESA must persuade its 22 member states to chip in to cover a €300 million shortfall in the €1.5 billion cost of both the 2016 and 2020 phases of ExoMars. On 1–2 December, at a meeting of government ministers, ESA officials will make their case that they are not throwing good money after bad. After the Schiaparelli loss, securing funding for ExoMars 2020 "is really more important than ever, if Europe wants to be seen as part of exploring our solar system," says David Southwood of Imperial College London, who was ESA's director of science from 2001 until 2011.
At the ministerial meeting, ESA officials will emphasize the success of the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), the other part of the ExoMars 2016 mission. As Schiaparelli fell to its doom, the TGO entered a highly elongated 4.2-day orbit around Mars. Next month, it will begin to calibrate science instruments designed to sniff out methane and other trace gases in the atmosphere to pinpoint their origin—not just where they arise, but whether they emanate from geological or biological sources. In March 2017, TGO will begin dipping down into the martian atmosphere, generating friction that will slow and circularize its orbit so that it can begin science observations later in the year. "We have 100 kilograms of science instruments in orbit around Mars. Solving the mystery of methane is now in our future," David Parker, ESA's director of human spaceflight and robotic exploration, told reporters last week.
Compared with the expected science return of the TGO, the weather data that Schiaparelli would have collected with just a few days of battery power on the surface was an afterthought. But as students of ESA's comet-orbiting Rosetta mission learned, the fate of plucky landers resounds in the public consciousness. In November 2014, Rosetta dropped the Philae lander to the surface of a comet, where it survived a couple days. Even though its few pictures and measurements were far surpassed by those of its mother ship, it captured the public's fancy and was a public relations coup.
ESA engineers studying what happened to Schiaparelli are working with information from several sources: data the lander transmitted to the TGO during its descent and elements of the same signal that were picked up by ESA's Mars Express orbiter and a radio telescope on Earth. All sources agree that the signal abruptly stopped around 50 seconds before the expected landing. Early analysis suggested that something went awry after the lander shed its parachute and heat shield and fired its thrusters to slow the final descent. That transition seemed to begin too soon, and the thrusters only fired for a few seconds before cutting out.
On 20 October, the day after the landing, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) flew over the landing site and snapped images with its low-resolution camera. These showed a white dot, thought to be Schiaparelli's parachute, and 1 kilometer away a fuzzy dark patch, 15 by 40 meters in size. ESA says this dark smudge is probably soil disturbed by the impact of Schiaparelli or even the scar of an explosion, since the lander's propellant tanks would have been full on impact. ESA says the lander probably fell from a height of up to 4 kilometers (the parachute was meant to release it at 1.1 kilometers), and that it would have hit the ground at 300 kilometers per hour. MRO is expected to take more pictures of the site this week with its high-resolution camera.
The pressure is on Schiaparelli's engineers because the ExoMars 2020 rover and its landing platform are already taking shape. Many components, which are being duplicated from Schiaparelli with little change, need to be shipped to Russia for integration into the spacecraft by next year, says Thierry Blancquaert, Schiaparelli's mission manager. The aeroshell that will protect the 2020 rover during descent and slow it as it enters the atmosphere is the same shape but instead will be built by Russia, which has been partnering with ESA on the ExoMars program since NASA pulled out in 2012. The parachute in 2020 will be the same type but will deploy in two phases—a small one followed by a big one—and the main chute will be much larger: 35 meters across compared to Schiaparelli's 12 meters.
The thrusters that will ease the 2020 rover onto the surface will be different, and are currently being developed by Russian space agency Roscosmos. But the radar Doppler altimeter—which senses the surface and allows the thrusters to bring the spacecraft down gently—as well as the guidance and navigation systems will be the same as Schiaparelli's, so those parts of last week's descent will be under special scrutiny.
Earlier this year, the planned launch date for the rover was delayed from 2018 to 2020 because of problems mating the ESA-built rover with the Russian aeroshell. Many see this as a blessing in disguise. "The industrial and instrument teams were following aggressive schedules, but the delay is a bit of relief," says Andrew Coates of University College London, principal investigator of the rover's PanCam imaging system. "Now there's time to do something about it."
It remains to be seen whether government ministers will decide that the 2020 mission is a good bet. Enthusiasts like Southwood say ESA needs to follow the example of NASA which, despite a series of Mars mission failures in the 1990s, kept doggedly at it. "Space exploration is tough. As long as we believe in its societal worth, Europe needs to show the same resolve as our American cousins."
Even with seven successful landings under its belt, Mars still makes NASA engineers anxious, says Allen Chen, who heads the entry, descent, and landing team for NASA's Mars 2020 mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mars's thin and unpredictable atmosphere means much can go wrong. Like ESA, NASA is also planning to drop a rover to the surface in 2020, as is China. "Every Mars landing attempt teaches us things," Chen says. "The only true failure is to stop trying."
(http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline__699w__no_aspect/public/1280x720_61028N_Exomars.jpg?itok=LDbT09Wv)