Friday, October 21, 2016

Splat!

It is looking pretty conclusive that Europe's Schiaparelli probe crashed into the surface of Mars at high speed and was destroyed.

Fortunately, this is not the bad news it might be - the probe's primary mission was to test descent technology for a larger planned spacecraft - and they got a lot of good data before it mysteriously broke radio contact and plummeted. The probe was not carrying a lot of instrumentation.

In other words, engineering continues as normal with the destruction of prototypes.

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