Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) tagged posts

An artist’s impression depicts the separation of the ExoMars 2016 entry, descent and landing demonstrator module, named Schiaparelli, from the Trace Gas Orbiter, and heading for Mars

European-Russian spacecraft were on course for Mars Monday after crucial deep-space manoeuvres in preparation for a daring mission to find evidence of life on the Red Planet. The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) mothership despatched the tiny Mars lander called Schiaparelli Sunday on a 3-day trek to the Martian surface in a key phase of the joint ExoMars project. There were nervous moments for ground controllers when TGO, designed to enter Mars’ orbit to analyse its atmosphere for life, stopped sending status updates for about an hour before coming back online.

In the early hours of Monday, the TGO successfully complet...

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 ...