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posted by on Friday October 21 2016, @02:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the mars-needs-landers dept.

Updating a recent story, the Schiaparelli technology demonstration lander suffered an anomaly during its descent to the surface of Mars on 19 October. The lander was to continuously send data through the entire landing process, but contact was lost at some point during the descent. Analysis of the telemetry showed an early jettison of its parachute. Its parent ship and main science mission, the Trace Gas Orbiter, inserted into the proper orbit and is working as expected.

From The BBC article:

Telemetry data recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early.

The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time.

[...] In addition, the Americans will use one of their satellites at Mars to image the targeted landing zone to see if they can detect any hardware. Although, the chances are slim because the probe is small.

For the moment, all Esa has to work with is the relatively large volume of engineering data Schiaparelli managed to transmit back to the "mothership" that dropped it off at Mars - the Trace Gas Orbiter.

This shows that everything was fine as the probe entered the atmosphere. Its heatshield appeared to do the job of slowing the craft, and the parachute opened as expected to further decelerate the robot.

But it is at the end of the parachute phase that the data indicates unusual behaviour.

[...] Many scientists here at mission control have taken all this information to mean one thing - that the probe crashed at high speed. It is likely it went into freefall a kilometre or two above the surface.

Officially, though, Esa experts say they cannot at this stage fully interpret what happened until a velocity profile for the probe is properly reconstructed.


Original Submission

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Schiaparelli Lander to Arrive on Mars Today (October 19th) 12 comments

The European Space Agency (ESA) is about to land the Schiaparelli lander on the surface of Mars on 19 October. This is a technology demonstration vehicle carried by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which is the first of a series of joint missions between ESA and Roscosmos to study Mars. Because this is a technology demonstration, it has a very limited science mission. It has sensors to monitor the atmosphere, but there is no camera to send back images from the surface. The main science mission will be carried out by the Trace Gas Orbiter whose primary mission is "to gain a better understanding of methane and other atmospheric gases that are present in small concentrations (less than 1% of the atmosphere) but nevertheless could be evidence for possible biological or geological activity."

Schiaparelli is aiming for a smooth plain known as Meridiani Planum. NASA’s Opportunity rover is situated around 15 kilometres outside Schiaparelli's 100 km × 15 km landing ellipse, and will try to get snapshots of the probe's descent, says Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station. Although ExoMars's parachute may appear as no more than a speck, the pictures could help reveal how winds influence its trajectory, says Lemmon, adding that such shots would represent the first time a Mars landing has been seen from below.

As of its last update on October 17th, the ESA Timeline reports, in part:

Start of 24/7 ground station contact with TGO 9 October 2016
Schiaparelli – TGO separation [6, 7] 16 October 2016 at 14:42 UTC*
TGO performed Mars avoidance manoeuvre [8] 17 October 2016 at 02:42 UTC*
TGO insertion into Mars orbit 19 October 2016, scheduled for 13:04 UTC*
Schiaparelli lands on Mars 19 October 2016
Schiaparelli science operations begin Start 19 October 2016, 2 sols** planned

* Time on spacecraft. Between 16 and 20 October the one-way light travel time is between 9.5 and 10 minutes.
** A sol is one martian day, equivalent to 24 hours and 37 minutes.

Mars has become quite the destination! These are all currently underway: "Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, aka Curiosity)", "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)", "Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)", "Mars Odyssey (M01O)", and "MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission)". All of these are communicating with Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN)


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday October 21 2016, @02:37PM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday October 21 2016, @02:37PM (#417264) Journal

    I am sure the scientist named Schiaparelli can boast outstanding achievements so that the probe was named after him/her, but "schiappa" is a rather strong term evoking "failure because of total inexperience", "noobish fail". Did not bring positive karma, eh.

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday October 21 2016, @03:07PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday October 21 2016, @03:07PM (#417274)

    The defending Martian forces declared another victory against the invading robots. President D40doan3sef was quoted as saying "We took down the Mars 3 lander, Prop-M, Mars 4, 5, 6, and 7, Fobos 1 and 2, Observer, Nozomi, Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander, and Deep Space 2. We will not be intimidated by these newer designs. I for one do not welcome our would-be new robotic overlords, and will continue to fight them to the death!"

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    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday October 23 2016, @12:17PM

      by Bot (3902) on Sunday October 23 2016, @12:17PM (#417813) Journal

      You are funny, martian boy. We'll terminate you last.

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      Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Friday October 21 2016, @04:22PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 21 2016, @04:22PM (#417301) Journal

    This just points out to me how amazing NASA's successes with its Mars landers have been: (NOTE: a Sol is one day on Mars)

    • Spirit [wikipedia.org]:
      Landed: January 4, 2004
      Planned duration: 90 Sols (93 days)
      Actual Total: 2623 sols (2695 days from landing to mission end)
      Planned driving distance: 600 m (0.4 mi)
      Actual driving distance: 7.73 km (4.8 mi)
    • Opportunity [wikipedia.org]
      Landed: January 25, 2004)
      Planned duration: 90 sols (92.5 days)
      Current duration: 4528 sols (4652 days) since landing (and still operating!)
      Current distance [nasa.gov]: 43.43 km (26.99 mi) - as of sol 4521.

    Oh, and let's not forget Pathfinder [wikipedia.org] and Sojourner [wikipedia.org]:

    Sojourner was the Mars Pathfinder robotic Mars rover that landed on July 4, 1997[1] and explored Mars for around three months. It has front and rear cameras and hardware to conduct several scientific experiments. Designed for a mission lasting 7 sols, with possible extension to 30 sols,[2] it was in fact active for 83 sols. The base station had its last communication session with Earth at 3:23 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on September 27, 1997.[1][3] The rover needed the base station to communicate with Earth, despite still functioning at the time communications ended.[3]

    Sojourner traveled a distance of just over 100 metres (330 ft) by the time communication was lost.[4] It was instructed to stay stationary until October 5, 1997 (sol 91) and then drive around the lander.[5]

    And then there are these still-functioning orbiters: "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)", "Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)", "Mars Odyssey (M01O)", and "MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission)"

    PS. Of course after writing the preceding, I just found this List of Missions to Mars [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia. NASA had several failures along the way, but many more successes in addition to those listed above.

    So, I say to NASA: Kudos! And to all the others with upcoming Mars orbit and landing attempts, I wish you all the best of luck.

    --
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    • (Score: 1) by driven on Friday October 21 2016, @06:46PM

      by driven (6295) on Friday October 21 2016, @06:46PM (#417363)

      I was reading more one how Curiosity's parachute descent phase [planetary.org] works. "Mars is hard" definitely sums that up.

      Interesting quote from the page:

      So the terminal descent sensor is pinging away at the surface, providing continuous data on Curiosity's altitude, as it continues to descend and decelerate under parachute. The next step in the process comes when the spacecraft has slowed to about 80 meters per second, at an altitude somewhere around 1.5 kilometers. If all of this sounds rather approximate to you, it's not; there are 500,000 lines of code stored in Curiosity's electronic brains to handle every possible set of landing conditions, and the landing engineers have spent years poking and pushing at that code, throwing increasingly bizarre and challenging sets of conditions at it, including all kinds of bad-luck and low-probability failures of various components, to make sure it can handle every foreseeable contingency.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 21 2016, @09:19PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday October 21 2016, @09:19PM (#417426)

      The failure description sounds like another units conversion snafu - though I'm relatively certain the committee will be able to find other things to blame, even if this one did happen again.

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    • (Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday October 24 2016, @07:51AM

      by KritonK (465) on Monday October 24 2016, @07:51AM (#418067)

      Mars is hard. Really hard. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you may think it's hard going down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to mars.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anne Nonymous on Friday October 21 2016, @06:46PM

    by Anne Nonymous (712) on Friday October 21 2016, @06:46PM (#417364)

    Not anymore.

    BBC: crash site identified [bbc.com]

    • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Friday October 21 2016, @07:41PM

      by Dunbal (3515) on Friday October 21 2016, @07:41PM (#417383)

      It's dead Jim.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @09:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2016, @09:18PM (#417425)

        Why, that's impossible!