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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 11 2016, @06:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the red-planet-gazette dept.

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."

-- submitted from IRC


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