With its suite of high-tech instruments, the Trace Gas Orbiter or TGO, should arrive at the Red Planet on October 19 after a journey of 496 million kilometres (308 million miles)
Two robotic spacecraft on Monday began a 7-month journey to Mars as part of a European-Russian unmanned space mission to sniff out leads to life on the Red Planet. Russia’s Proton rocket carrying the spacecraft launched into an overcast sky at the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe at 0931 GMT according to plan ExoMars 2016, a collaboration between ESA and Roscosmos, is the first part of a 2-phase exploration aiming to answer questions about the existence of life on Mars.
With its suite of high-tech instruments, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in October after a journey of 308 million miles. TGO will photograph the Red Planet and analyse its air, splitting off from the Mars lander dubbed Schiaparelli days before entering its atmosphere. The second phase, a Mars rover due for launch in 2018, seems likely to be delayed over financial concerns. One key goal is to analyse methane, a gas which on Earth is created in large part by living microbes, and traces of which were observed by previous Mars missions.
Picture released by the European Space Agency shows the Russian Proton rocket that will launch the ExoMars 2016 spacecraft during its transfer to the launch pad
Methane is normally destroyed by UV in within a few hundred years, which implied that in Mars’ case “it must still be produced today”. TGO will analyse Mars’ methane in more detail to determine its likely origin. One component of TGO, a neuron detector called FREND, can help provide improved mapping of water distribution on Mars, amid growing evidence the planet once had as much if more water than earth.
Picture released by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows technicians working on the final preparations on one of two ExoMars spacecraft
A better understanding of water on Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, could aid scientists’ understanding of how the Earth might cope in conditions of increased drought. Schiaparelli, in turn, will spend several days measuring climatic conditions including seasonal dust storms on the Red planet while serving as a test lander ahead of the rover’s anticipated arrival.
Today’s Martian surface is considered too dry and radiation-blasted for living organisms to survive, but conditions would have been much more comfortable—warmer and wetter—some 3.5 billion years ago
The rover scheduled for 2018 has been designed to drill up to 7ft into the Red Planet in search of organic matter. Although TGO’s main science mission is scheduled to last until Dec 2017, it has enough fuel to continue operations for years after, if all goes well. A manned mission to Mars would take place “maybe in 20 years or 30 years.
Space has been one of the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and the West that has not been damaged by ongoing geopolitical tensions stemming from to the crises in Ukraine and Syria. http://phys.org/news/2016-03-spacecraft-blast-mission-life-mars.htmljCp
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