What Europe's Other Lost Mars Lander Tells Us About Schiaparelli's Fate
Yesterday, the European Space Agency's attempt to put a lander on Mars ended on an ominous note when the scientific payload, named Schiaparelli, mysteriously lost contact during its final descent. This led to many scientists and Twitter spectators wondering whether the lander was now nothing more than rubble somewhere on the Red Planet.
However, another Martian mission, this one conducted more than 13 years ago, landed on Mars in an eerily similar fashion. The ending of that story could tell us something about Schiaparelli's future.
Martian Scrap Metal?
Back in 2003, Britain's Beagle 2 lander was supposed to be Europe's first Martian lander. Those plans were dashed when it suddenly and inexplicably lost contact while dropping onto the surface of Mars from an ESA spacecraft. That lost lander came just four years after NASA had crashed another lander, the Mars Polar Lander, into Mars' surface. For almost a dozen years, the consensus was that Beagle 2 was now nothing but Martian scrap metal.
Then, in 2015, something strange happened.
Beagle 2 showed up, almost completely whole, in high resolution images from NASA. It turned out that the landing had been much more successful than originally believed. In fact, ESA likely lost contact with Beagle 2 because of improperly deployed solar panels.
Thus, while ESA concedes the lander's destruction is the most likely scenario, losing contact with Earth doesn't guarantee that Schiaparelli has been destroyed. Like Beagle 2, it could have had a glitch that forced it out of contact with Earth. And whereas Beagle 2 couldn't recover from its messy landing despite being reasonably intact, there are plenty of other examples of landers and spacecraft coming back from the dead, like China's Yutu moon rover. Even NASA's Curiosity rover has been plucked from the perils of "safe mode" a time or two.
On to ExoMars
The more time that ticks by without a signal, the more likely it is that, whatever the cause, Schiaparelli is truly gone. But even if the lander really is just a pile of rubble, the mission scientists will take heart. That's because getting Schiaparelli safely to the surface of Mars wasn't really the ESA's end goal-the landing was meant mostly to serve as an early test for the ESA's ExoMars rover that will launch in 2020.
"They've ticked off three or four of the five or six pieces that are needed to make a successful descent."
Following Beagle 2's unceremonious failure, the ESA crafted a much safer landing process to use for both the Schiaparelli test lander and the coming ExoMars rover. Even a crashed Schiaparelli could still help them refine that landing procedure for ESA's more valuable science payload four years later. After all, it appears that several (though clearly not all) steps of the landing process worked exactly as planned.
"There are a number of things that went right," Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Popular Mechanics. "They successfully navigated to the top of the Martian atmosphere, the heat shield separated correctly, the parachute-and supersonic Martian parachutes are a really tricky thing to get right-worked, the separation event of all the different pieces coming off seems to have worked. So they've ticked off three or four of the five or six pieces that are needed to make a successful descent."
The data coming back from the successful and still operating part of yesterday's mission, the ESA's Trace Gas Orbiter, can also attempt to pinpoint the exact cause of the landing failure. So, while Beagle's fate remained unknown for almost twelve years, answers about Schiaparelli shouldn't take nearly as long.
We leave behind a lot of crashed landers, exploded rockets, dead rovers, and lost satellites on the path to every successful mission.
While the definitive answer to what happened remains unclear-and we might not know the whole story for a few weeks-the ESA continues to analyze new info that came from the orbiter just this morning. Early results suggest that the parachute deployment, heat shield deployment, and deceleration in the atmosphere were all successful, but the ESA researchers have also already noted some anomalies in the planned landing, including an unexpectedly early deployment of the parachute and the thrusters shutting down too early.
Until the ESA finishes its analysis, we have no way of knowing exactly what state the lander is in or how it got there. Like they say: Space is hard. We leave behind a lot of crashed landers, exploded rockets, dead rovers, and lost satellites on the path to every successful mission. Maybe Schiaparelli will become another casualty in that pursuit. But even though it didn't quite make it as planned, Schiaparelli-like the missions that came before it-has pushed us a little closer to the next successful Mars landing.
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