Exomars

A test prototype of ESA's ExoMars 2020 Mars rover got a workout last week in Spain’s Tabernas Desert – which is odd because mission control was a thousand miles away at the Harwell Space Cluster in Oxfordshire, England.

Data returned by the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter indicates that astronauts on even short future Mars missions could face significant space radiation hazards and would be exposed to at least 60 percent of their total lifetime career radiation exposure limit.

Even though ESA's ExoMars 2020 rover is due to launch in only two years, the robotic explorer is still lacking a name. To remedy this, astronaut Tim Peake announced today at the Farnborough International Airshow that the UK Space Agency is starting a public competition to find a suitable moniker.

The ESA/Roscosmos Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is mere weeks away from commencing its atmospheric search for evidence of recent geological activity, and possibly life on everyone’s favorite Red Planet.

It has to be one of the slowest parking attempts ever made, but ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has completed a daring maneuver that saw it surfing the outer layers of the Martian atmosphere for 11 months.

After a seven-month investigation, ESA has released the results of its inquiry into the crash of its unmanned Schiaparelli lander on Mars last October. Telemetry data and orbital images show that the accident was due to a violent rotation of the module that fooled the onboard computer.

While many people are taking it easy for the holiday season, ESA is gearing up for a very busy New Year. On January 19, the space agency will begin a complicated year-long maneuver to radically alter the orbit of the Trace Gas Orbiter around Mars using the Red Planet's atmosphere as a giant brake.​

ESA and Thales Alenia Space have signed a contract to go ahead with the Euro-Russian project scheduled to launch in 2020 that aims to place a rover on the Red Planet.

ESA has shared its new orbiter's first images of the Martian surface, providing a tantalizing preview of more data yet to come. ​

​ESA has identified the malfunction that made the unmanned Schiaparelli Mars lander crash and explode on the surface of the Red Planet. According to the space agency, it was due to the navigation system being overloaded.

The ExoMars mission will make its first observations of Mars during two orbits to test and calibrate instruments in preparation for a detailed study of the atmosphere of the Red Planet beginning in 2018.

​Though exactly what happened to ESA's Schiaparelli lander when it crashed on the surface of Mars is unclear, one possibility is that the unmanned spacecraft shut down its landing engines early because it thought it was already on the ground.