NASA spacecraft finds lander robot buried on Mars

NASA's Mars orbiter detected the location of the Schiaparelli lander after it opened its parachute too early and crashed into the planet's surface.

Photo of the place where the Schiaparelli robot crashed into the surface of Mars. Photo: NASA.

Images sent back to Earth yesterday by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft helped the control team confirm that the Schiaparelli probe crashed into Mars and may have exploded after a strong impact, according to Live Science.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Schiaparelli lander stopped transmitting signals to Earth about a minute before its scheduled landing on the morning of October 19. ESA experts said that Schiaparelli's parachute opened too early, causing the rocket to decelerate early but not long enough before the device touched down.

The photos show a light-colored object that could be the robot's 12-meter-diameter parachute, along with a dark area 40 meters long and 15 meters wide that is likely where the robot hit the ground.

"We estimate that Schiaparelli fell from a height of 2-4 km, so the impact occurred at a speed of over 300 km/h. The relatively large size of the dark area is due to the strong impact surface. It is also possible that the robot exploded because the propellant tank was still full. These preliminary estimates will be refined after we do further analysis," said the ESA chief.

The Schiaparelli robot could explode after a collision. Photo: PA.

ExoMars experts believe the fuel tank is still full because data transmitted from Schiaparelli indicates the robot did not operate its thrusters to slow down for long enough. MRO took the images with the CTX camera, which has a fairly low resolution. According to ESA, MRO will capture clearer images of the impact site with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera next week.

The dark patch lies 5.4 km west of Schiaparelli's intended landing site, in the Meridiani Planum highlands south of the Martian equator.

Along with the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), Schiaparelli is part of the first phase of the ExoMars programme, a joint effort between ESA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, to send a probe to search for signs of life on Mars in 2020.

According to VNE