The missing Schiaparelli Mars lander of the European Space Agency is believed to have crashed while attempting touch down on Mars.
Schiaparelli, an entry, descent and landing demonstrator module, entered the Martian atmosphere two hours before the mothership ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter placed itself into the Mars orbit.
Schiaparelli was released from the ExoMars TGO on Sunday, Oct. 17. However, ESA lost contact with the lander less than a minute before its scheduled touchdown at 1448 GMT (10:48 a.m. EDT), and there is still no word on its fate.
ESA Monitoring Still On
The teams at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt are still monitoring and they have not formally confirmed the outcome.
Launched on March 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Schiaparelli and the TGO had the mandate to demonstrate the capability of ESA to perform a controlled landing on the surface of Mars.
The probe is feared to have crashed as satellites could not give its latest status. The somber news came after ESA successfully put the TGO into the Mars orbit as part of the ExoMars 2016 mission.
The joint venture with Russian space agency Roscosmos is part of an international mission that aims to explore life on the red planet.
ESA will be analyzing the telemetry Schiaparelli transmitted to the TGO to gather clues on what went wrong before communication was lost and figure out what happened with the expected touchdown.
"The signal (from Schiaparelli) went through the majority of the descent phase but it stopped at a certain point that we reckon was before the landing," Paolo Ferri, ESA's head of operations, said in Darmstadt, Germany.
"To conclude more on this because there could be many reasons for that, we need more information," Ferri said.
Landing on Mars has always been a challenging exercise, especially the final descent, which happens in such high speeds that everything has to be just right else the spacecraft will crash into smithereens to the ground.
However, Schiaparelli carried all the safeguards, including a heat shield, a parachute and rocket thrusters to balance its approach to the Martian surface.
According to space observers, the loss of the Schiaparelli Mars lander will be a blow to ESA after the failure of the Beagle-2 lander in 2003.
Nevertheless, some scientists do not see Schiaparelli's absence as overwhelming. They see it more as a technology demonstrator to gain a learning experience for landing the six-wheeled rover on Mars in 2021.
Meanwhile, the TGO will be studying the behavior of gases such as water vapor, methane and nitrogen dioxide in the red planet's atmosphere.
