The part of the ExoMars 2016 mission that apparently did go well. (Image courtesy of ESA.)
The ESA announced that while the mission’s Trace Gas Orbiter executed a successful burn placing it in orbit around the Red Planet, the second stage of the mission, landing and establishing contact with the piggybacking Schiaparelli lander, has reached a snag.
Before reaching the Martian atmosphere, mission control in Germany lost contact with the craft.
Although contact with Schiaparelli has been cut, the ESA has been using all of the resources at its disposal to ping the lander and determine its location, assuming it’s still intact. Included in this small army of inter-planetary properties are the ESA’s own Mars Express, NASA’s MAVEN probes, the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope located in India and, of course, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
According to the ESA, “If Schiaparelli reached the surface safely, its batteries should be able to support operations for three to ten days, offering multiple opportunities to re-establish a communication link.”
For any fan or follower of space exploration, these types of setbacks can be disappointing. They prove that we still have a tremendous amount of work to do before we can really call ourselves a space-faring species.
Then again, these type of failures bring into sharp relief how incredible the successes of previous Mars missions have been, let alone our recent trip past Pluto, the Rosetta lander reaching and landing on a meteor and of course, the Viking space craft exiting our solar system.
To read about another organization’s plans for Mars, check our China’s robotic duo for its 2020 Mars Mission.