The last few kilometres of Schiaparelli’s apparently ill-fated 56 million km, seven-month journey to Mars were always going to be the diciest. Landing on the hostile surface of the red planet has proved a challenge to many missions, and Schiaparelli’s mission was precisely to test landing technology and techniques – specifically a parachute and retro-rocket landing system to be used by a future rover for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) next Mars mission, in 2020.
The radio silence from the craft since it started its descent on Thursday – transmission stopped around 50 seconds before the planned touchdown – does not bode well for the double mission, the €. 1.3 billion Exo-Mars project of the ESA and the Russians in which Ireland has a small stake (it contributed €17.3 million to the ESA in 2015).
But even if the disc-shaped, 577kg lander, named after Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who in 1877 began mapping the topography of Mars and its dramatic channels, remains silent, the spacecraft on which it travelled to Mars, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), appears to be still performing well. It will not land but travel through the Mars atmosphere testing for trace gases such as methane.
Its purpose is to search for signs of past and present life on the planet, the evidence for which is mixed. Recent evidence of Martian water, complex organic molecules and methane combined with findings from the 1976 Viking mission have raised the prospect – though no more than that – of hardy microbes surviving on the planet.
Meanwhile, in the US, President Obama on Tuesday recommitted the US to putting boots on Mars by the 2030s, while new research suggests the trip may not be such a good idea. It won't just give you bad jet lag – it may fry your brain. The study in Scientific Reports has found that the levels of cosmic radiation travellers to Mars's inhospitable dusty surface and -90F temperature would be exposed to could lead to brain damage, anxiety and chronic dementia. Maybe we should just leave it to the little green men.