Rocket blasts off on mission seeking life on Mars

TWO robotic spacecraft began a seven-month journey yesterday to Mars, part of a European-Russian unmanned space mission to sniff out leads to life on the Red Planet.

Carrying the craft, Russia’s Proton rocket launched successfully from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe, the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

ExoMars 2016, a collaboration between ESA and Roscosmos, is the first part of a two-phase exploration aiming to answer questions about the existence of life on Mars.

With its suite of high-tech instruments, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in October after a journey of 496 million kilometres.

TGO will photograph the planet and analyse its air, splitting off from the lander, Schiaparelli, shortly before entering its atmosphere.

A second phase, a Mars rover due for launch in 2018, seems likely to be delayed for a year or two over financial concerns.

One key goal is to analyse methane, a gas which on Earth is created largely by living microbes, traces of which were observed by previous Mars missions. “TGO will be like a big nose in space,” ExoMars project scientist Jorge Vago said.

Methane was destroyed by ultraviolet radiation within a few hundred years, which, the ESA said, implied that in Mars’ case it must still be produced today.

TGO would analyse Mars’ methane in more detail than previous missions, to try to determine its likely origin, the ESA said.

One component of TGO, a neuron detector called Frend, can help provide improved mapping of water distribution on Mars, amid growing evidence that it once had as much, if not more, water than earth.

A better understanding of water on Mars could aid scientists in knowing how the Earth might cope in increased drought conditions.

Schiaparelli, in turn, will measure climatic conditions, including seasonal dust storms on Mars, while serving as a test lander ahead of the rover’s arrival.

The module takes its name from 19th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, whose discovery of “canals” on Mars caused people to believe, for a while, that there was intelligent life on our neighbouring planet.