A new image shows the desert plane on Mars where ESA will land the Schiaparelli module on 19 October this year. This will be the first European landing attempt on the red planet since 2003’s ill-fated Beagle 2.
Known as Meridiani Planum, this area of Mars is relatively flat which makes it as safe as possible for the landing attempt. Nasa’s Opportunity rover landed here in 2004.
The region has been well studied from orbit and shows good evidence of once having been covered in water. There are clay sediments and sulphates that were likely formed in the presence of water, and a number of water-carved channels.
Although Schiaparelli is designed primarily to test entry, descent and landing, it does carry a number of scientific sensors. It will essentially be a martian weather station, designed to return key information about what initiates the dust storms that engulf the planet every martian spring.
It has to work fast. It has no solar panels and so relies only on battery power, which will last between two and eight Martian days (called sols). Schiaparelli’s “mothership” is the Trace Gas Orbiter.
Launched on 14 March 2016, it will enter Martian orbit in October and begin a comprehensive study of the planet’s atmosphere that will last until at least 2022.
In recent decades Nasa has been cautious about its search for life on Mars. It has chosen to concentrate on looking for the evidence of past and present water on Mars, in an attempt to assess the planet’s habitability. ESA’s ExoMars programme is bolder. It will actively search for evidence of life.
A key investigation for the Trace Gas Orbiter is to search for the origin of methane in the martian atmosphere. On Earth more than 90% of methane is produced by living organisms. The rest comes from geological processes.
In 2003 and 2006, concentrations of methane were unexpectedly spotted in three specific regions of Mars. This led to speculation that they could be coming from living micro-organisms underneath the planet’s surface. The Trace Gas Orbiter will monitor the atmosphere for methane, pinpointing the location of any outburst before the gas has time to dissipate into the atmosphere.
An even more ambitious mission is planned for 2020. This is when ESA plan to launch the ExoMars rover. If successful, it will be the first non-American rover on the Red Planet and will carries a suite of instruments including the Mars Organic Molecule Analyser (MOMA).
Masterminded by the Max-Planck-Institute for Solar System Research, Lindau, Germany and the University of Paris, France, MOMA will look for Martian “biomarkers”. As the name implies, biomarkers are molecules produced by biological processes and could reveal the origin, evolution and distribution of any life that arose on Mars.
But funding for this mission is not yet completely secure. Originally, the ExoMars programme was to be performed in collaboration with Nasa. The American space agency pulled out of the collaboration in 2012, placing the whole programme in limbo.
ESA then struck a deal with the Russian space agency Roscosmos to revive the programme later that year. But money continued to be tight. In 2014, the UK government pledged almost £50 million to the project, meaning that the life-searching rover would be built in the UK at Airbus in Stevenage.
However, the mission still needs a few tens of millions of Euros to be found before the end of the year to remain on track for 2020 launch. Undoubtedly, a successful landing would go a long way to bolster confidence in ESA’s ability to land a rover safely on the Red Planet, and loosen the purse strings.
Mars is notoriously difficult to land upon because of its thin atmosphere. This means that parachutes only have limited effect and so other systems such as retrorockets must be used. For 1997’s Mars Pathfinder mission, Nasa used airbags to cushion the final. A similar system was used by ESA for landing of Beagle 2.
In addition to a heatshield, a parachute and retro rockets, Schiaparelli will use something similar to a crumple zone on a car to cushion its landing.
Images from an orbiting spacecraft returned in 2014 showed that Beagle 2 landed safely but a final solar panel, which covered the radio receiver, failed to deploy and so the lander could not communicate with Earth.
Learning from this lesson, the Schiaparelli module will be in permanent communication during its landing attempt. ESA will confirm precise details and timings nearer to the day.
Stuart Clark is the author of The Search for Earth’s Twin (Quercus), and co-host of the podcast The Stuniverse (Bingo Productions).
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