– A European Mars mission launched on a Russian rocket Monday (March 14), sending an orbiter and an experimental lander on a journey to find signs of life on the Red Planet. This device will play a crucial role once the orbiter is in routine operation around Mars, providing daily data relay services for NASA and ESA landers and rovers.
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The ExoMars 2016 orbiter will search for signs of life from above Mars and for evidence of water-ice deposits on and just beneath the Martian surface.
Dr Manish Patel, from the Open University, who is in charge of TGO’s ozone-mapping ultraviolet (UV) spectrometer instrument, said: “This is a fantastic mission, massive”. When the two unmanned probes reach the red planet in October they will separate for their missions.
ExoMars, which cost the European Space Agency alone 1.3 billion euros ($1.44 billion), is the first interplanetary mission jointly undertaken by ESA and Roscomsos. Though it’s not a lander, it will test landing radar, navigational cameras, and other instruments that will be used for the ExoMars 2018 lander mission.
There are only two possible sources of Martian methane – ongoing geological processes such as volcanic activity, or life.
From January 2017 to December the probe will use friction with the atmosphere to “aerobrake” and lower itself to an altitude of 250 miles (402km).
To determine whether the methane is of biological origin, the TGO will measure levels of carbon-13 isotopes in the gas.
ExoMars 2016, ESA’s mission to Mars, has launched successfully from Baikonur, Kazakhstan at 09:31 GMT this morning.
Today Mars is an apparently lifeless arid desert.
If these biological “fingerprints” are found, it would mean that life probably has existed, or perhaps still exists, on Mars.
Scientists believe billions of years ago Mars may have had the conditions to support life – a thick atmosphere, and liquid surface water.
“With the Trace Gas Orbiter we’re going to go and study where the methane’s coming from, study whether it’s seasonal, study the geographical locations”.
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The ExoMars 2018 rover will search for tell-tale mineral deposits left behind by micro-organisms, and look at the “chirality” – the right or left-handed configuration – of organic molecules.
