Mars Probe Premature Jettison

Mars probe likely crashed at high speed and went into free fall a kilometre or two above the red planet’s surface, data suggests.

16:48 21 October 2016

Things did not go as planned when Europe’s Schiaparelli headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday. Telemetry data recovered from the probe suggests that its parachute was jettisoned too early while the rockets appeared to fire for too short at a time.

 

Experts will continue to analyse the data while the Americans will use their satellites on Mars to detect the hardware. However, the chances of finding it are very slim.

 

According to the data obtained, everything was going as expected as the probe entered the atmosphere. Its heatshield has successfully slowed down the craft and the parachute opened as expected to decelerate the robot. However, unusual behaviour was noted at the end of the parachute phase. It showed that the chute jettisoned earlier than called for while the retrorockets were seen to fire just three or four seconds. They were expected to fire for a good 30 seconds.

 

Andrea Accomazzo, the head of operations for Esa's planetary missions, said: "We cannot resolve yet under which, let's say, logic that the machine has decided to eject the parachute. But this is definitely far too early compared to our expectations,"