The loss of Schiaparelli shows what a glorious age we live in

We know that we have lost Schiaparelli; the second attempt by the European Space Agency to land on the surface of Mars, and the second to fail.  On Christmas Day 2003 Beagle 2 landed successfully, but failed to unfold all four of its solar panels, and so was never able to radio Earth.

In December 2015 the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the landing site, and showed us how close it had come to working.

Beagle 2 model at Liverpool Spaceport. Mike Peel

Mars is hard.  It’s a long way to send a fragile box of sensitive electronics, and America, Russia, and Europe have all lost spacecraft trying to enter orbit around the planet, or survive the high speed plunge through its atmosphere.

While at first it seems there is little of happiness to take from the failure of a probe that hundreds of hard working scientists and engineers have poured years of effort in to, that is not the case at all.  There is a very positive take home from this whole enterprise.

Schiaparelli was a test bed designed to try out Europe's new landing system, and while the landing became a crash, so much engineering data was uplinked to the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, that ESA is still waiting to recover it all.  The next time a larger version of this system will be used is in 2020 to deliver a combined Russian and European rover to look for traces of life on Mars.  Believe me, the data recovered from a failure will allow the platform to be made significantly more reliable.  Nothing teaches more about possible failure modes than actually having one.

The main part of this mission is the Trace Gas Orbiter, which successfully inserted in its initial elliptical orbit, and is now aerobraking to adjust its speed and orbit in to a 400 km high circular orbit.  In seven months time it will start mapping the Martian atmosphere, in part to tell us if the Methane we have found before has a geological, or possible, biological origin.

But for me the best thing to happen is the pictures that are coming out, for these really show what we are capable of.

It’s only been three days, but already we have some very exciting images, with the prospect of more to come.

NASA / JPL / MSSS / ESA / Emily Lakdawalla

This GIF is from the fantastic blog of planetary geologist and science writer, Emily Lakdawalla, and shows a before and after of an area within Schiaparelli's landing zone.  These images were taken with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's context camera, and have a six meter resolution, meaning each pixel is about six meters across.  In a few days time MRO should be in the right place for the HiRISE camera to image the area.  It has a resolution of one meter, or better.

It can take pictures like this one of the Opportunity rover.  It was 300 miles above it at the time!

Have a look at a much larger version here.

Schiaparelli came down on the Meridiani Planum, the same plain that Opportunity is currently on, and indeed an attempt was made to image the landing using the mast-cam on Opportunity.

This picture came out earlier.

We can now be sure that this is just cosmic radiation hitting the electronics in the mast-cam, and that at a distance of 54km, Schiaparelli was too far away, and too low on the horizon for Opportunity to have any chance of spotting it.

Mars has no magnetic field, and so there is a lot more cosmic ray activity at the surface than on Earth. All cameras on Mars take numerous images of high energy particles.  This is a better example, also seen while waiting for Schiaparelli.

The most hopeful and positive aspect of all of this, is that you and I live in a time when humanity can gather this data, take these images, and share them between thousands of fascinated individuals.  The technology that we have on Mars, combined with the technology we have on Earth make this a golden age of discovery and investigation.  An age that all of us are invited to partake in.