Race against time to launch Europe’s troubled mission to Mars

Posted on December 15, 2019 by Admin

European Space Agency asks for help from Nasa with ExoMars project as trials fail and cost rises to €1bn

Space engineers are racing against time to fix major faults in the robot probe they plan to send to Mars next year. The complex parachute system that should slow ExoMars – Europe’s largest ever planetary mission – as it plunges into the Martian atmosphere failed catastrophically during recent tests.

As a result, the European Space Agency has called for emergency help from Nasa space engineers to help them save their stricken mission. New parachutes are now being tested at the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and will be subject to high-altitude trials in two or three months.

Daring Mars mission to send rocks back to Earth in hunt for past life

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Admin

Europe poised to join US in complex plan to find evidence of fossil microbes on red planet

Engineers plan to collect rocks on Mars and bring samples to Earth, in one of the most complex robot space projects envisaged. The scheme, being developed by Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa), will involve robot rovers finding rocks that might contain evidence of past life.

The samples would be blasted into space, intercepted by an unmanned spacecraft, and dropped by parachute in the Utah desert, with the 500g of Martian soil and rock shared with researchers round the world.

European satellite in near collision with Elon Musk SpaceX craft

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Admin

ESA say its Aeolus Earth observation satellite fired thrusters to avoid crash

The European Space Agency has said it altered the trajectory of one of its observation satellites to avoid a collision with a craft operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“@ESA’s Aeolus Earth observation satellite fired its thrusters, moving it off a collision course with a @SpaceX satellite in their Starlink constellation,” the agency’s Twitter account said.

Mars rover’s large methane discovery excites scientists

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Admin

Curiosity’s record-breaking measurement fuels speculation it is from microbial Martians

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has detected its largest belch of methane on Mars so far, fuelling speculation that the robot may have trundled through a cloud of waste gas released by microbial Martians buried deep under the surface.

Mission scientists announced on Monday that Curiosity had measured a record-breaking 21 parts per billion (ppb) of methane in the air in Gale crater, the rover’s landing site and area of exploration. The level is substantially more than the 5.8ppb it sensed on 16 June 2013.