BERLIN — Pictures taken by a NASA satellite show a black spot where the Schiaparelli lander was meant to touch down Wednesday, the European Space Agency said. The images end days of speculation over the probe’s likely fate following unexpected radio silence less than a minute before the planned landing.
The agency said in a statement that the probe dropped from a height of 2 to 4 kilometers (1.4 miles to 2.4 miles) and struck the surface at a speed exceeding 300 kph (186 mph), “therefore impacting at a considerable speed.”
It said the large disturbance captured in the NASA photographs may have been caused by the probe’s steep crash-landing, which would have sprayed matter around like a blast site on Earth.
“It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full,” the agency said.
Schiaparelli was designed to test technology for a more ambitious European Mars landing in 2020. The European Space Agency said the probe’s mother ship was successfully placed into orbit Wednesday and soon will begin analyzing the Martian atmosphere in search for evidence of life.
“In my heart, of course I’m sad that we couldn’t land softly on the surface of Mars,” agency chief Jan Woerner told The Associated Press. “But the main part of the mission is the science that will be done by the orbiter.”
Woerner said engineers received a wealth of data from the lander before the crash that will prove valuable for the next attempt in four years. He described the mission as “a 96 percent success.”
Still, the crash-landing was a painful reminder of how hard it is to put a spacecraft on the surface of the red planet.
Its resting place was photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter , which also spotted Europe’s last ill-fated mission to the surface of the planet. The Beagle 2 probe landed on Mars in 2003 but failed to deploy its solar panels properly, preventing it from functioning.
FRANK JORDANS
