Last week, the European Space Agency lost contact with the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander during its harrowing six-minute descent to the Martian surface. Fifty seconds before it was scheduled to make a soft, controlled landing on Mars with the assistance of nine thrusters, ExoMars stopped transmitting.
There were initial hopes that the Schiaparelli lander, a $320 million joint mission with Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, was only temporarily silent and would resume transmitting despite a rough landing on Mars.
Many days later, the Schiaparelli lander is still silent and its exact location still unknown, but its mission to gather valuable atmospheric data needed to ensure a successful landing for the Martian rover the ESA plans to send to Mars in 2020 was not a failure. Valuable information was gathered during the descent.
After separating from its orbiting mother ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter, the lander’s supersonic parachute deployed and heat shields worked properly as it streaked through the Martian sky at 13,000 mph.
While transmitting data during its descent, the lander’s thrusters turned on earlier than they were supposed to before abruptly turning off, leaving the lander to a fate that would be decided by gravity and whatever distance was left during its descent. The loss of the signal indicates that the Schiaparelli lander hit the Martian surface hard.
Still, much of its mission was accomplished. ESA has a lot of data to pore over to prep for the automated Mars rover mission that will aggressively seek out signs that life once existed on the planet. A soft landing last week would have been infinitely preferable to the hard landing, but even failures are instructive when it comes to space exploration. Don’t cry for the Europeans, they’re just getting started.
First Published: October 24, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
