Europe's Mars Lander Crashed
Schiaparelli Crash Site Located From Orbit
“NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has identified new markings on the surface of the Red Planet that are believed to be related to ESA’s ExoMars Schiaparelli entry, descent and landing technology demonstrator module. Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h. The relatively large size of the feature would then arise from disturbed surface material. It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full. These preliminary interpretations will be refined following further analysis.”
Keith’s note: ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter is in orbit around Mars. As for Schiaparelli, all is known right now is that it separated, entered the atmosphere, and landed. Whether that landing was successfull will need to wait several hours for additional data to arrive and be analyzed.
Keith’s update: Its not looking good for Schiaparelli.
Update: ExoMars Schiaparelli Lander Likely Lost But Descent Data Valuable for ExoMars Rover Mission [With press conference video]
While the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has settled into a nominal orbit, the fate of the Schiaparelli lander seems sealed, with the Red Planet claiming another victim.
During today’s press conference ESA officials said early analysis of the data coming from Schiaparelli confirms “that the entry and descent stages occurred as expected, with events diverging from what was expected after the ejection of the back heat shield and parachute. This ejection itself appears to have occurred earlier than expected, but analysis is not yet complete. The thrusters were confirmed to have been briefly activated although it seems likely that they switched off sooner than expected, at an altitude that is still to be determined.”
As of right now, contact with Schiaparelli is lost.
God Speed Schiaparelli
Real landings on Mars are extremely difficult, there are a heap of failures and a handful of successes. Hopefully this will be a success. Interesting though how followers of SpaceX talk about Dragon landings as though they are a forgone conclusion. Hope they succeed as well.
True, but the NASA record is 7 successful out of 8 attempts. Only the Mars Polar lander failed to land safe. So it is understandable SpaceX is expecting success.
And how many interplanetary missions did NASA do in that time compared to SpaceX? There’s more to it than just landing. Personally I think they will succeed, but they won’t succeed by assuming because NASA’s done it they’ll be OK.
Except that NASA is supporting Red Dragon while SpaceX has hired NASA personnel, and their expertise before as needed.
I don’t have a list of NASA/LockMart/etc. people they have hired, so I can’t make a judgement on that. NASA supporting a company is very different than NASA (or their experienced contractors) doing the work.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too cynical or tired of the impression that SpaceX thinks all this stuff is easy when they have yet to even make it out of Earth orbit. Trust me. It’s not. Or maybe I’m just jealous. That’s possible.
And who is designing, testing and qualifying the Red Dragon electronics that must survive the long trip in interplanetary space with higher radiation than in low earth orbit?
SpaceX is (or will be) doing all the designing, testing and qualifying. NASA’s role is giving advice about things like telecommunications, navigation and planetary protection. I guess I’ve lost track of who is arguing about what in this thread.
You forget the Mars Observer (1992) and the Mars Climate Orbiter (1998) also failed. A separate lander (Deep Space 2) was lost on the same mission as the Mars Polar Lander.
DS2 might take the total up to three (it did consist of two penetrators.) But he was talking about landings. MO and MCO weren’t landers. Well, I guess MCO ended up being one, but that wasn’t the plan. I’m not sure what the score is when you include orbiters and flybys. Some of the early failures were launch failures, and I’m not sure if that counts (since it isn’t specific to a Mars mission.)
I was referring only to landers, not all Mars missions, so you forgot Mariner 3.
Schiaparelli is (or was) an engineering test. That means a crash can be a success. As long as they learn why, and how to avoid the problem in the future, then it’s a success. Engineering tests are all about learning through trial and error, which sort of means error is part of the process.
The same is true of the SpaceX Red Dragon idea. I don’t think anyone’s calling a safe landing a forgone conclusion; quite a few people think a failed attempt would be more progress than doing nothing until you’re sure it will work. That makes learning something a forgone conclusion (at least, as long as you make sure to send back enough telemetry to diagnose the failure.)
I don’t buy this argument. Being an engineer, I understand the engineering argument that you learn via testing, but I know of no engineer that would call it a success to fail when you have maybe 2 or 3 chances to land on Mars in a career, if that. Even accepting the premise that failure is a success, they lost data 50 seconds prior to landing so all that engineering data is lost, too. That in no way diminishes the work and effort ESA put into it. I applaud them. But this was not a success. A valuable failure, yes.
Yes calling a risky mission a test is sometimes a method used to set the bar low and minimize the repercussions of a failure. Again its the semantics.
By that logic, there is no such thing as flight testing. Do you actually believe that?
As I stated its semantics that can be used to CYA. Their use of “test” in this case is grey, would you not agree?
As I stated earlier semantics can be used to CYA. Of course there are tests and then there are tests. I hope you realize this is a move to get buy in, continued momentum and funding for their 2020 mission. Calling it a test (while still getting science) provides cover in the event of “failure”, Based on this classification there is only success. I hope their “test” meets all its objectives:/
People certainly can, and have, played that game. But I tend to pay attention to what other scientists say about it. For the past five years or so, at conferences and project meetings, there have been many presentations and lots of discussion about the other parts of ExoMars. Lots of people are interested in Trace Gas Orbiter (which got into orbit without problems) and its expected results. There is interest in the planned 2020 ExoMars lander. At those same conferences and meetings, Schiaparelli was basically just mentioned in passing, as in, “Oh yea, and they also tacked some instruments on the EDL test.” I didn’t see anyone standing up at major scientific conferences and saying anything about all the things Schiaparelli was going to discover. Quite the opposite: It was originally supposed to be a real science mission, and it was descoped when the US backed out as a partner. That did create quite a bit of discussion among scientists. Everyone was disappointed that Schiaparelli was no longer a science mission, but just an engineering test.
So I’d say this isn’t a semantics game to disguise a failure. This was a real test, to reduce risk for the 2020 landing.
As far as success, the ESA director-general said today (Oct 21) that they had gotten 80% of the planned telemetry during the EDL phase, and that satisfies their success criteria for the mission.
“As far as success, the ESA director-general said today (Oct 21) that
they had gotten 80% of the planned telemetry during the EDL phase, and
that satisfies their success criteria for the mission.”
Wow. “Pay no attention to the smoking wreckage on Mars. This was a success!”
Having suffered through this horrible Presidential election campaign, I’ve absolutely had enough of spin doctors. I’m not saying ESA hasn’t learned a lot from this failure or that they shouldn’t have tried. But let’s be realistic, this thing was a failure. Fix it and move along, like the US did turning the failed MPL design into Mars Phoenix.
I agree with you about spin doctors (over a decade after the fact, I’m still complaining about ESA passing off a defective radio receiver as “an issue involving Doppler shift.”) But I don’t think this is a case of spin. If they had been hyping up all the great science Schiaparelli would do, and _then_, after it crashed, started talking about it just being a test, I’d definitely call that spin. But they’ve been consistently describing it as an EDL test since the mission, in its present form, was approved. The statement that getting 80% of the EDL telemetry is the success criteria probably goes back to pre-launch requirements documents. Mars Polar Lander is different, since it was supposed to do quite a bit after landing; no one convinced NASA to fund it as an engineering test.
Politics trumps technical here. EDL was sized to fill the gap on the TGO mission. So it was always an engineering demonstration. The landed payload was minimal. The radar was not given a full chain test till too late. Alleviating the cost burden on a contractor. Given the shifted priorities there was nothing wrong with that per se. Once NASA bailed on Exo-MARS, because of the timeline; EDL was the longest lead item and became a rescue job. Priorities shifted, heads dropped, contracts were cut, new subbies activated at the last minute, budget margins were slashed and reallocated elsewhere…. this is the inevitable result. ESA can take some excellent lessons (mainly non technical) from this beyond the you-can’t-do-Mars-on-the-cheap. TGO was the primary mission and the EDL was an adjunct but a lot of effort was put into it. Russia is in-charge of the 2020 EDL. How many successful landings do they have? Their Mars curse seems to be more about getting there…
Remember, they are sending a rover on the 2020 launch opportunity, and they really, really want that to work. Schiaparelli was intended as a test of the EDL systems, to make sure the 2020 landing would be successful. It looks like they discovered a bug in the system, and now have a chance to fix it before it costs them a very important scientific mission.
As far as the telemetry goes, the latest news (http://www.bbc.com/news/sci… is that the parachute released too early and the retrorocket fire was also early and short. Loss of signal was 19 seconds after these events, and 50 seconds earlier than the expected landing. It sounds like they have good data on the anomalous behavior.
Is someone checking the units? (Wonder if it’s too soon to joke about it)
ESA and all of their contractors use metric. They may even specify SI metric. On the other hand, they do still use minutes and hours, with weird factors of 12 and 60. That dates back to ancient Babylonian astrology. I wish people would _really_ go metric and shift to kiloseconds.
Semantics are a funny thing aren’t they. That’s why Physicians “practice”, statistics are used to make opposing arguments on the same topic and why some “missions” are called tests. I believe Schiaparelli had some science instruments on the lander.
It had a minimal surface environment package. Not, overall, something anyone would send to Mars for its own sake. There are plenty of tests where you need a payload, just to have a realistic landed mass, and sticking on an instrument is better than just flying a brick.
Are you honestly saying no one ever tests something to make sure it works, in advance of depending on it to work for later, important uses?
Neither Neil nor I are saying that. Like or not, when you have so few opportunities to do something on Mars (unlike say, flight testing, which you mention), success is defined as success. This isn’t a bunch of engineers sitting in a lab throwing stuff on a wall to see what sticks.
I’m sorry, but you seem to be saying it could not have been a flight test, simply because you can’t believe anyone would waste a Mars landing on a flight test. That’s actually what they said all along, and plenty of people were disappointed they weren’t doing more. Similarly, SpaceX has said their Red Dragon plan is purely an EDL test and they don’t even plan to put any non-engineering instruments on it. Do you have trouble believing that? It’s certainly going to cost them more than Schiaparelli cost ESA, and they don’t seem concerned about wasting a rare opportunity.
Yeah, I do. It’s a waste for them to do a purely non-engineering test.
Sorry, I meant pure engineering test not non-engineering test on the last post. I can’t seem to edit that last post I made from Disqus. I think it’s a waste for anyone to go to Mars and not try to do science.
Well there are two European landers on Mars by now. The unknown part is the resale value
Technically, I don’t see the resale value changing much. The value as an observing platform is in doubt. The resale value is about the value to archeology and to collectors, a hundred or so years from now. MPL, Beagle 2, and possibly Schiaparelli will not be dramatically less valuable as a wreck. And I don’t even want to think about the Elgin marbles-like debates which could result from a Chinese collector recovering an European Mars lander.
Nah, by the time anyone gets to recover one of these, the ownership might just be a small provincial squabble anyways 🙂
The OST and Rescue Convention are clear, they belong to the launching state forever.
I did mention the Elgin marbles, didn’t I? That’s still a legal mess, despite the fact that Elgin had permission, in writing, and from the recognized government of the area, to take them. Of course, the Greeks feel that written permission from the Ottoman empire, who happen to have conquered Greece and were occupying it at the time, doesn’t really count.
To connect this back to space policy, what does the Outer Space Treaty say about Mars 3? The nation which launched it no longer exists. The Russian Federation has inherited most of the former Soviet Union’s treaty obligations, but Mars 3 was actually launched from the territory of Kazakhstan, which was also part of the Soviet Union. I suspect that, if this ever came up, a large number of lawyers would end up with guaranteed employment for life.
I think it only had batteries for a few hours of life.
It does have a limited battery life, but it is programmed to switch itself off most of the time, when orbiters are not overhead to communicate with.
4 sols up to 10 sols actually. Planned so that the orbiters would have a few passes to collect the onboard recorded engineering data, i.e. high sampling rate telemetry
That’s disappointing, but at least the more scientifically valuable part of the mission (the Trace Gas Orbiter) made it successfully.
Another search project for MRO.
JPL’s web site is showing before and after images. Looks like the white blob below the impact is the parachute.
Can anyone estimate the size – or even depth – of the crater we are seeing? Perhaps that’s too much to extract?
I doubt it. That’s taken with MRO’s context camera, which has about 6 meter (20 foot) resolution. I think the press release said we’re seeing probably more disturbed dust than actual crater. I’m not sure about this region, but there are parts of Mars where there seems to be a thin layer of lighter dust over a darker subsurface. If so, the crash provided an active experiment on martian surface properties… In any case, the press release also mentioned they will take some images with MRO’s HiRISE instrument, which gets 0.3 m (1 foot) resolution in a few days. That should show the size and, possibly, depth of the crater.
Meters, kilometers….