FAILED EUROPEAN MARS LANDER

Sadly not all the efforts of space exploration this year were triumphs.

Once again, Mars proved a tricky beast for Europe’s space agencies to conquer. In October the ESA and the Russian space agency tried to put an exploratory lander dubbed Schiaparelli on the surface of Mars.

Instead they lost contact with the lander and after days of worried suspense they concluded it crash landed on the planet’s rocky terrain.

Pictures later taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed a black spot in the area where the Schiaparelli lander was meant to touch down, confirming fear the lander had crash landed on the Martian surface in a fiery failure. The spacecraft reportedly flew into Mars at 540 kilometres per hour instead of gently gliding to a stop, after a computer misjudged its altitude, scientists said in November.

But there is a silver lining.

The botched touchdown was effectively a test run to pave the way for a larger future rover to be launched in 2020.

As such, European space officials have insisted that any problems encountered by Schiaparelli were part of the trial-run and would inform the design of the future rover.

The rover is due for launch in 2020 and will drill up to two metres deep to search for remains of past life, or evidence of current activity.

“In some ways, we’re lucky that this weakness in the navigation system was discovered on the test landing, before the second mission,” ESA’s Schiaparelli manager Thierry Blancquaert said.