It's not yet official, but signs are increasingly pointing to the European Space Agency's Skyparelli lander having crashed on the surface of Mars. At a press conference this morning, the agency's representatives said that the lander successfully completed the first steps of entering the atmosphere and landing, but its parachute disconnected earlier than expected and its rocket engines operated for a very short time, before losing contact with it.
Did the Schiaparelli lander fail to land and crash on the planet's surface? The European Space Agency does not yet have an official answer and is examining the information it has, but the signs are not encouraging at all.
The small Schiaparelli lander was supposed to serve as a technological demonstrator for Europe's ability to land on the surface of the Red Planet, and to assist in the successful landing of the next mission of the Exo-Mars project led by Europe in cooperation with Russia - the Exo-Mars rover scheduled for launch in 2020. The lander was launched in March This year aboard the TGO probe and separated from it on October 16 on its way into the Martian atmosphere.
At a press conference held this morning in Darmstadt, Germany, the representatives of the Medical Space Agency said that from the information received from the lander before the loss of contact with it, it becomes clear that the first stages of the landing were carried out successfully. After entering the atmosphere yesterday as planned, Schiaparelli's heat shield worked as expected and performed the initial deceleration of the lander's enormous speed (21,000 km/h). Later, the parachute also opened at the right speed and height.
The data changed from the expected starting from the end of the parachute phase, when the parachute disconnected from the lander earlier than expected. After that, the data showed that the rocket engines of the probe were activated for a very short time of 3-4 seconds, instead of 30 seconds as planned. Also, they started operating at a higher altitude than expected. After the engines stopped working, contact with the lander continued for another 19 seconds, then disappeared.
The representatives of the European Space Agency said that it will take time, between days and weeks, until it will be possible to reach a final conclusion about what happened to the lander, based on the data sent from it and in combination with models based on the atmosphere of Mars. But the available data, together with the fact that contact has not yet been made with the lander, do not look encouraging, and it is very possible that after the engines stopped working, the lander fell and crashed on the ground.
Whether the lander eventually managed to land in one way or another or crashed, representatives of the European Space Agency, led by agency chief Jan Werner, emphasized the experimental nature of the lander's mission. "The main goal of Schiaparelli was to test European landing technologies. Documenting the data during the landing was part of this, and it is important that we can learn what happened, in order to prepare for the future," Werner said.
"We have data that will allow us to fully understand the steps that happened, and why a soft landing didn't happen," said David Parker, director of the agency's manned flight and robotics research division. He added that "from an engineering point of view, this is what we want from an experiment, and we have extremely vital information to work with. We will have an investigative committee to check the data more deeply and we cannot speculate beyond that at this stage."
Compared to Schiaparelli's apparent failure, the agency's personnel emphasized the success of its mother probe TGO, an acronym for Trace Gas Orbiter, or "Trace Gas Orbiter" in Hebrew translation. The capsule, they emphasized, is the main component of the mission and it is expected to provide the main scientific results from the first phase of the Exo Mars project, in contrast to Schiaparelli, which, as mentioned, is mainly a technological demonstrator, and contained only limited scientific equipment.
The probe performed a rocket burn at the same time the lander began its atmospheric entry and landing phases, and successfully entered an initial orbit around Mars. The probe will begin its scientific mission after entering an operational orbit in November 2017 at an altitude of 400 km. The entry into the operational orbit will be done gradually, and will be done through friction with the upper atmosphere of Mars, instead of using a rocket engine.
During its scientific mission, TGO will search, among other things, for evidence of the existence of methane in a small amount in the atmosphere of Mars. Methane may indicate biological activity on the Martian surface, as it is unstable over time in the atmosphere, so some source must replenish it. This source can be biological as on Earth, where most of the methane is produced by living organisms, or from another geological source that does not involve biological activity. So far, the measurements made from other probes and telescopic observations have left the question of the existence of methane in the Red atmosphere open.
The European Space Agency had hoped that Schiaparelli would be its first successful lander since the failure of Beagle 2 in 2003. Beagle 2 It actually landed successfully, but was unable to successfully deploy its solar panels which hid its antenna and prevented it from making contact with Earth.
But the apparent failure of the landing may be more than just a symbolic blow to the agency. for the project Missing $300 million for its second part, which is scheduled for launch in 2020 and includes a European rover and a Russian platform that will serve as a stationary research station on the ground. In December they are supposed to converge European Union ministers in Switzerland and to decide, among other things, on the future of the project. With the failure of the lander, it may be more difficult to convince them to approve the continuation of the program.
The Exo Mars project has gone through many ups and downs since it was announced in 2002. The project was previously planned to be carried out in cooperation with NASA, but it withdrew from it in 2012 due to budgetary problems related to financing the development of the James Webb Space Telescope. The project might have been completely scrapped, if not for Russia joining in and saving it.
One response
This is the third failure in a series of probe landing failures by the Iranian space industry.
A previous attempt failed to land a probe on Mars or a similar celestial body (the probe that failed is named Bagel for those who want to find out more details via Google).
A second attempt to land a European probe is the Philae landing on a comet from the spaceship named Rosetta. They tried to hide this failure for several months in which they claimed that maybe Philae managed to land, this is a false claim from the beginning (Pilea jumped several times before disappearing and photographs of her showed her lying on her side).
The current attempt is the third failure.
There is no doubt: the Europeans are not capable of landing generosity, it's a shame for the money they spend for this purpose.