[LINK] "ESA Mars lander feared lost in final minutes of descent"

[rfmcdonald]

The Guardian's Ian Sample notes that the news of the Schiaparelli lander, part of the ExoMars project, is not good.

After a journey of seven months and half a billion kilometres across the solar system, the fate of the European Schiaparelli Mars lander was uncertain on Wednesday night amid fears that a last-minute glitch had scuppered hopes for a historic touchdown on the red planet.

Earlier in the day, the half-tonne spacecraft was on target to become the first from the European Space Agency to perform science on the Martian surface. But despite a seemingly perfect approach to the planet, the lander appeared to run into difficulty as it neared, or reached, the ground.

At the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, grim-faced mission controllers peered at their monitors as the moment they expected the probe to call home came and went in silence. Hours later, the veteran Mars Express orbiter relayed data back to Earth that the lander had gathered on the way down.

“Those signals stopped at a certain point which we reckon was before the landing,” said Paolo Ferri, head of mission operations at ESOC. “It’s clear this is not a good sign.”

The high-speed descent called for the Schiaparelli lander to slow from 21,000 km (13,039 miles) per hour to a standstill on the Martian surface in the space of six minutes. In that time, the spacecraft was programmed to release a parachute and fire nine thrusters to slow its fall through the tenuous, dust-filled atmosphere, before belly-flopping the final two metres to the ground, a crushable underside cushioning the blow.

Signals broadcast from the probe and picked up by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India showed that the descent was going well until the final moments when the telescope lost contact.