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Mars Lander Crash Complicates Follow-Up Rover


Claire.

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Mars lander crash complicates follow-up rover in 2020.

Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are racing to figure out what went wrong with the Schiaparelli Mars lander. On 19 October, it seemed to drop out of the sky and crash to the surface less than a minute before its planned soft landing. A diagnosis is urgent, because many of the same pieces of technology will be used to get a much bigger ExoMars rover down to the surface in 2020.

More than engineering is at stake. If the ExoMars 2020 rover is to fly at all, ESA must persuade its 22 member states to chip in to cover a €300 million shortfall in the €1.5 billion cost of both the 2016 and 2020 phases of ExoMars. On 1–2 December, at a meeting of government ministers, ESA officials will make their case that they are not throwing good money after bad. After the Schiaparelli loss, securing funding for ExoMars 2020 “is really more important than ever, if Europe wants to be seen as part of exploring our solar system,” says David Southwood of Imperial College London, who was ESA’s director of science from 2001 until 2011. 

Read more: Science

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They've got all the data they are going to get I think. The 'chute released too early and the retro's fired for too short a time. My guess would be Ground Proximity sensors or software malfunction. 

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4 minutes ago, keithisco said:

They've got all the data they are going to get I think. The 'chute released too early and the retro's fired for too short a time. My guess would be Ground Proximity sensors or software malfunction. 

I guess what I meant is I hope the analysis of the data they retrieved provides an explanation such as why did the parachute release early?  Was it damaged or did the sensors fail?  Why didn't the rockets fire for a longer duration?  etc.

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