The fate of Europe's Mars lander is unknown — watch live as a crucial signal reaches Earth
ESA/D. Ducros
If all went well around 10:48 a.m. EDT Wednesday, a joint European-Russian probe called the Schiaparelli lander safely plopped down in the red dirt.
However, we may not know if the mission was a success until Wednesday afternoon.
The European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed via Twitter that its probe survived the most harrowing part of its descent — plowing through the Martian atmosphere, deploying a parachute, and firing its thrusters — but has not yet said if the probe stuck the landing.
The space agency said via Twitter that this is normal, since Schiaparelli's radio signal to its mother ship was expected to be very weak. So right now engineers are combing through the recorded data, which was relayed to the Mars Express orbiter.
Mars Express has replayed its recording for Earth, but the ESA said it may be after 12:30 p.m. EDT before it has fully processed the information:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/788775324389634048
#MarsExpress team now processing @ESA_EDM landing recording to extract the trace of the lander's signal as it descended to Mars #ExoMars
If that search is inconclusive, ESA will have a second chance to contact Schiaparelli: When it wakes up from a planned nap around 1 p.m. EDT and tries to talk to Mars Express.
If Mars Express confirms the probe's landing, Schiaparelli will be the ESA's first spacecraft to safely reach the surface of the red planet. But if no signal is recorded, the probe may have joined a growing graveyard of failed Martian spacecraft.
Although more of an engineering proof-of-concept than a science mission, the lander is one-half of the ExoMars 2016 mission, which is a precursor to a more ambitious rover mission in 2020.
The other half of ExoMars 2016 is Schiaparelli's mother ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). The ESA confirmed its satellite safely entered into Mars orbit on Wednesday, which means its task of sniffing for methane on Mars — a potential sign of microbial life — can begin.
For Russia, Schiaparelli could be the nation's third successful Mars landing. (It landed two others during the Cold War when it was known as the Soviet Union.)
You can watch the ESA discuss the results of the current mission live starting at 11:40 a.m. EDT via the livestream video provided at the end of this post.
You can also watch live via the ESA's Facebook page, and check for the latest mission updates directly from the ESA via its Twitter accounts and website.
A hair-raising descent
ESA/D. Ducros
Wednesday's attempt wasn't Europe's first try at landing a probe on Mars.
In 2003, the ESA tried to touch the Beagle 2 lander on Mars. After jettisoning it from an orbiting spacecraft, however, the robot was lost and never heard from again.
It wasn't until January 2015 — more than a decade later — that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found and photographed the dead rover in a satellite image. An subsequent investigation found that its solar panels had failed to deploy, so it never mustered the energy to phone home to Earth.
The 8-foot-wide Schiaparelli lander departed from its Martian gas-sniffing mother ship, TGO, the morning of October 16.
Its hair-raising descent to the surface of Mars should have taken less than 6 minutes because it initially traveled at 13,000 mph (21,000 kph).
To slow down, Schiaparelli first burned through a heat shield, deployed a parachute, and later cut the parachute loose. After free-falling for awhile, it fired its thrusters. From here on, we don't yet know what happened.
Schiaparelli was supposed to slow toward the surface until its sensors detected that it was hovering just a few feet from the ground.
ESA/D. DucrosAt that point the thrusters should have stopped, dropping the probe with a thud onto a honeycomb-like pad that's designed to crumple and absorb the impact.
Whether a success or failure, the probe is really a practice run for a future ExoMars 2020 wheeled rover mission.
But Schiaparelli should have taken pictures of its descent (they should be available Thursday, October 20).
If it survived, it will attempt to measure Mars' electric field for the first time, among other limited scientific observations.
Watch live landing coverage
The ESA is broadcasting live coverage of the landing attempt starting at 11:40 a.m. EDT on October 19. (Click play to start the livestream.)
The broadcast will come in two parts, though we're not quite certain what they'll cover in each segment:
- Part 1: 11:44 a.m. EDT - 12:59 p.m. EDT
- Part 2: 2:25 p.m. EDT - 4:03 p.m. EDT
Again, the probe was expected to land around 10:48 a.m. EDT — but there is now a delay in confirming the mission's success or failure (hence the later start time), including a 10-minute gap due to the time it takes a signal from Mars to reach Earth.
NOW WATCH: Europe and Russia are about to make history by landing a spacecraft on Mars