The fun starts on the 16th and will climax as Schiaparelli lander touches down next Wednesday
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/11/exomars_arrival/
Grab some popcorn, space enthusiasts, because this coming weekend the joint European Space Agency/Roscosmos "ExoMars" mission will arrive at Mars.
ExoMars broke the surly bonds of Earth last March and has since proven itself capable of taking photos and sending them home on a 2 Mbit/s link.
Now for the hard part.
The mission comprises two sub-missions. The first, the Schiaparelli lander, will separate from ExoMars on Sunday, October 16th. It will then spend three days circling Mars before making a six-minute descent to its surface. Schiaparelli is billed as a "landing demonstrator" that will "will test a range of technologies to enable a controlled descent and landing on Mars in preparation for future missions, including a heatshield, a parachute, a propulsion system and a crushable structure."
The heatshield is designed to help the survive its passage through the Martian atmosphere at an expected initial speed of 21,000km/hr. A pair of parachutes will then slow things further, before the propulsion system – rockets – lower it to just a couple of meters above Mars' surface. At that point the rockets will cut off and the "crushable structure" should absorb the impact.
The Entry and Descent Module Descent Camera (DECA) should shoot the whole thing.
The lander bears what the ESA calls a "small science package" that can measure "wind speed, humidity, pressure and temperature at its landing site, as well ... measurements of electric fields on the surface of Mars that may provide insight into how dust storms are triggered."
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @09:33PM
The US is the only nation to successfully land on Mars. The Soviet Union and the UK have both tried, but failed. If this lander works, it will be the first successful non-US lander.
Mars is tricky to land on because it has strong enough gravity to require significant braking energy, yet an atmosphere too thin to rely mostly on parachutes for slowing when near the surface.
(The Soviets claimed their lander was "successful" because it did briefly send weather data from the surface, but succumbed to unknown problems shortly after touchdown. One theory is that a dust-storm, known to be in the area, pulled on the parachute and yanked the probe over such that its antenna was then pointing wrong. Unlike Viking, the Soviets had no ability to park in orbit to wait out bad weather.)