Why you shouldn’t be too upset about Schiaparelli’s crash landing
On October 19, 2016, news around the world was dominated by an out-of-this-world story: The European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars 2016 Mission had finally made it to Mars. After a long and treacherous 7-month flight, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) was ready to insert itself into orbit around the red planet and finally release its precious cargo, the Schiaparelli Entry, Descent, and Landing Module (EDM), to head to the surface. Contrary to what you might think, it was, in many ways, a successful mission.
You see, the primary objective of this stage of the ExoMars programme was to get the TGO into orbit around Mars — a task that was completed masterfully. The TGO is meant to help us gain a better understanding of gases in Mars’ atmosphere — particularly methane, a subject close to my heart. The main source of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is microbes, but there are also non-biological sources — such as water-rock interactions and ancient gas slowly oozing out of ice. On Mars, any of these sources are possible — and we hope the TGO can help us figure out which. Hundreds of scientists around the world are now eagerly awaiting the data from its scientific instruments.
So that’s the good news — but as you cannot fail to have noticed, it’s been somewhat eclipsed by the admittedly sad, untimely demise of its lander, Schiaparelli. Let me give you some context. Primarily designed as a technology demonstrator to test the equipment and processes needed to enable a safe future landing for the ExoMars rover in 2020, Schiaparelli carried a small number of scientific instruments on board. If it had landed successfully, it would have been the first European probe to land on Mars, and it would have conducted some actual experiments. And of course it’s crucial for us to learn how to land rovers successfully on Mars to access its surface, where evidence of life may be hidden.
However, Schiaparelli didn’t arrive in one piece: all that seems to remain of it is a large dark smudge and a 2-and-a-half-metre crater gouged into the Martian surface. This violent end — which appears to have been caused by the parachute deploying too early and the thrusters not firing long enough to pull off a soft landing — has left a lasting scar on the Martian surface, not to mention the public psyche.
Here’s the thing, though. As a species that places high value on exploration, we tend to build strong psychological, emotional connections to our space-faring robotics. When they “fail” — as they inevitably have — we feel their loss deeply, and we just as passionately celebrate their triumphs. Even so, it might comfort us to remember that each mishap has only driven us to try again, to design better and build stronger.
To put it simply: the Schiaparelli was essentially a practice run — and even its sacrifice will offer us incredibly valuable information about landing on Mars. All the data it has sent back will inform scientists and engineers back on Earth what worked, what didn’t — and hopefully why. This is what space missions are all about — learning from what goes right and fixing what goes wrong — and practice practice practice.
Which brings me to MURFI — the Mars Utah Rover Field Investigation — the beginning of the next step once we do manage to access the surface of Mars. What happens once you and your robotic proxy are finally there and ready to search for evidence of life? Just as with the mechanics of space travel and planetary landings, this requires an incredible amount of rehearsal. MURFI is just such a rehearsal, underway right now. MURFI is a trans-Atlantic planetary simulation of a Mars mission — a step-by-step run-through of the procedures, protocols, personnel and, most importantly, patience required to successfully robotically explore Mars.
In the Utah desert near a small town called Hanksville, the UK Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency are working together to operate two Mars rover test platforms. A Mars Operations Centre (MOC) based in Canada is sending commands to the Canadian rover, and the UK MOC team — of which I am a member — is directing the UK rover from our base on the Harwell Campus, near Oxford.
There are lots of reasons why mission trials like MURFI are useful, but our primary goals are to gather experience running rover operations in preparation for real planetary missions, safely and cost-effectively. The mission will help scientists hone their skills in preparation for the ExoMars 2020 rover — the second part of the aforementioned TGO and Schiaparelli mission — which will drill down into the Martian surface to look for signatures of ancient life. MURFI’s Earthbound mission goal, meanwhile, is to find outcrops of rocks and deposits of sediments in Utah where evidence for extinct life might be preserved — an analogue for what we might find on Mars.
MURFI’s field team is on site in Utah braving the outdoors, looking after the rover and its instruments while pretending they are on Mars. Meanwhile, back in Oxford, the operations team is pretending that the images and data they’re looking at are being sent back to them from Mars.
Importantly, MURFI is a “blind” simulation: the operations team is not allowed to talk to the field team under any circumstances, nor is it allowed to know anything about the local environment. They don’t even know yet where the rover has “landed.” All they’ll get is what they can glean from the images and data the rover sends back, and from Mars-like satellite images already acquired. There’s even a 7-hour time difference between the UK and Utah — over-simulating Earth-to-Mars communications delays which, at worst, is 24 minutes. Still, you can never be too prepared for a loss of signal or communications issues in a real mission scenario!
The field team and rover team are doing fieldwork outside of the Mars simulation as well, effectively following along behind the rover and copying the science to “ground truth” the study. This means that once the mission is over, we’ll find out whether the rocks we chose to study through the rover’s eyes were good targets — as well as what we missed, what we did wrong, what didn’t work and why. On Mars, such hindsight isn’t an option. If you missed a good target, you’ve missed it, or you may never learn how improving your search techniques could have helped you find it. Debriefing our successes and failures is how we figure out how to spot the best sites to explore on Mars, what tools are best to use and in what order, how to cope with long days, communication delays and, most importantly, how to work as a team.
So don’t mourn Schiaparelli too much. You’d never dream of taking your driving test without having first driven a car, nor expect to pick up a violin for the first time and be able to play a concerto. Learning new skills is about trial and error, refining technique and having the determination to keep going when things don’t work as planned. Mars exploration is no different.
Dr Louisa Preston is an astrobiologist searching for life on Mars, funded by the UK Space Agency. She has been involved with planetary simulations since working on analogue missions for the Canadian Space Agency. She is the author of Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe.
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