ESA's ExoMars Successfuly Lifts Off From Baikonur (esa.int)

vikingpower writes: The European Space Agency's second mission to Mars, ExoMars, was successfully launched from the Baikonur launch pad today. ExoMars will search for traces of life, either past or present, on the Red Planet, and is the precursor to a more full-fledged mission to Mars in 2018, comprising a rover. It consists of an orbiter and of Schiaparelli, a lander built by European industry and scheduled to land in October this year. Both missions are cooperations between ESA and RosKosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. If one of them met their ultimate goal -- proving there is or was life on Mars — the excitement here on Earth would be unimaginable. Mark Whittington adds a link to The Guardian's coverage and a bit of detail: The Russian-made launch vehicle lobbed a probe into space, the Trace Gas Orbiter, that will enter orbit around Mars later in 2016 and search for methane in the Red Planet's atmosphere. Methane can have a number of sources, but one of them is the waste product of microbial life. Both the Mars Express orbiter and the Mars Curiosity rover have detected some measure of methane, which could be produced by geological processes as well.

Comments

From an American

[Anonymous Coward]

Best of luck with this mission, I will be excited to see the results of your experiments.

Call Mulder

[mmiscool]

Aileen life from a planet in the same solar system. Now that would be interesting.

Re:Call Mulder

[LifesABeach]

God speed ExoMars.

if ESA finds mars life

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing to think that there's a chance we will find extraterrestrial life in the next few years! It seems like that would be the biggest discovery of our lifetimes, and it would answer a question humans have pondered for thousands of years.

If we have never found any life outside earth, t hen it is hard to say how common it may be. If ESA and Russia finds some life on another planet, even microbes or even signs of past microbes that have died, well it means life might be very common in the universe any time that the conditions can support that.

Go ExoMars!!!

Re:if ESA finds mars life

[vikingpower]

OP here. The same thought occurred to me, while watching the Proton M rocket being launched. As it blasted off, I got that combination of itch and cold shivers I now know, as an experienced engineer, to be the foreboding of something grand. You know - I was a teenager when the Viking landers first visited Mars, and that planet seemed an utterly remote, hostile place then. Not to speak of the gas giants. Then Voyager 1 & 2 began sending their astonishing images of Jupiter; I remember being knocked off my feet by them. Then came Cassini, and its marvelous "pale blue dot" image gently forced us to re-think our situation here on Earth once more. And over the years, Mars seemed to edge ever closer, at least in our perception, up to the point where teams are already simulating long stays in isolation, including communication delays, to prepare for a human visit. Mars, in my mind, is now a bit like the Gobi desert: I'll never go, but it seems close enough, even nearly reachable. But... if life were found on Mars, either past or present, it would cause a revolution in our minds and in our thinking compared to which the one caused by the Vikings and Voyagers would appear very, very minor, however important those were in their own right. Most importantly, such missions do not only tell us about neighbouring worlds: they feed us back information on our selves, on who we are and where we stand. And that is well worth all the tax payers' money - that is invaluable.

Re:if ESA finds mars life

[Applehu Akbar]

Well said!

im sure the call was open for america to join

[nimbius]

ESA: Hey america! we're going to start a new mission to mars and we wanted to know if youd be up to help?
NASA:has anyone seen the budget for climate change research? We sent darrel out ages ago to the copier but since we cant afford to replace the lights around here the grue might have gotten him.
ESA: w-well it seems like youre a little busy i guess...
Russia:: did you call america to see if they want to come along on the new mission?
ESA: theyre uh, working on a different mission i think. its okay though, maybe next time.
Russia: da. I spoke with America last week. Theyre working on some kind of wall? or the healthcare again? maybe I wasnt paying attention. The man on the phone just kept telling me he "guaranteed" they were working on things and that america would be great again.
ESA: nothing about mars though? Russia: They asked if I could rescue Matt Damon if we went...
ESA: *sigh*

Re:im sure the call was open for america to join

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you, an idiot ?

NASA is doing all of this and more already.

I like how you're a partisan idiot, in the middle of the shit you just spewed onto the internet.

Re:im sure the call was open for america to join

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you, an idiot ?

NASA is doing all of this and more already.

I like how you're a partisan idiot, in the middle of the shit you just spewed onto the internet.

Well, I am sure glad to know that NASA is rescuing Matt Damon.

Re:im sure the call was open for america to join

[Anonymous Coward]

Havent you heard. NASA already rescued him, and he is back on Earth. He was even seen walking around in the oscars earlier this months.

Re:im sure the call was open for america to join

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you, an idiot ?

NASA is doing all of this and more already.

I like how you're a partisan idiot, in the middle of the shit you just spewed onto the internet.

Well, I am sure glad to know that NASA is rescuing Matt Damon.

The American Taxpayer is sick and tired of repeatedly bailing Matt Damon out of trouble!

Re:im sure the call was open for america to join

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we spent enough rescuing the guy?

Courage Under Fire (Gulf War 1 helicopter rescue): $300k
Saving Private Ryan (WW2 Europe search party): $100k
Titan A.E. (Earth evacuation spaceship): $200B
Syriana (Middle East private security return flight): $50k
Green Zone (US Army transport from Middle East): $50k
Elysium (Space station security deployment and damages): $100m
Interstellar (Interstellar spaceship): $500B
The Martian (Mars mission): $200B

That's a good chunk of $1T just for one guy.

Re:im sure the call was open for america to join

[KGIII]

Yeah but I've seen the Bourne movies and I think we kind of owe it to him. (I've only actually also seen him in The Martian and some movie about a sniper.)

Re:im sure the call was open for america to join

[Hylandr]

*Whoooosh*

Imagine the excitement if they found

[Anonymous Coward]

liquid water on Mars!

Would space missions pay for themselves?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame the shuttle is offline. Would these mission fees have payed substantially towards keeping the program alive?

When will the US Private Sector be able to compete for these services? Walowitz might have been on a different flight!

Re:Would space missions pay for themselves?

[khallow]

When will the US Private Sector be able to compete for these services? Walowitz might have been on a different flight!

Falcon Heavy scheduled to launch later this year.

Yes, it was

[johannesg]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"On July 2009 NASA and ESA signed the Mars Exploration Joint Initiative, which proposed to utilize an Atlas rocket launcher instead of a Soyuz, which significantly altered the technical and financial setting of the ExoMars mission."

"Under the FY2013 Budget President Obama released on 13 February 2012, NASA terminated its participation in ExoMars due to budgetary cuts in order to pay for the cost overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope.[21][22] With NASA's funding for this project completely cancelled, most of these plans had to be restructured."

Re:Yes, it was

[JohnStock]

Yup. Basically the cuts in the US's funding screwed over Europe's plans.

Keep your fingers crossed

[Crowd Computing]

The success rate of Russian missions to Mars is quite low. In fact, if we don't include the launches made by the former USSR, which also had a low success rate, the success rate would be zero: two mission failures out of two launches. In contrast, India, a relative newcomer to deep space, managed to succeed with its one and only mission to Mars.

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[110010001000]

What does this have to do with Russia? Russia built the launch vehicle.

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[OzPeter]

The success rate of Russian missions to Mars is quite low.

Yeah .. the russkies should stick to what they know .. Venus

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[Anonymous Coward]

And the orbiter and trace gas detection suite and a few of the landers sensors. The Europeans only built the lander and most of the landers sensors. 50-50 project by value added (dollars)

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[Rei]

I'm all for that. Venus is a far more human-friendly target for colonization, and as for simple basic science, we know vastly less about Venus than we do Mars.

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[Maritz]

It's an interesting comment. I'm assuming you mean high in Venus' clouds? I'm sure you're aware the surface is hot enough to melt lead and is awash with sulfuric acid and enormous temperature and pressure. On Mars you'd freeze and suffocate, but on Venus well... burned, crushed, corroded... :)

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[Rei]

See my comment further down. I'd pick around 70 degrees latitude, 55,5km altitude during the daytime, 52km at night. A correction: the surface is not awash in sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid cannot exist anywhere close to those temperatures at Venus pressures; it starts to fade out in the lower cloud (which seems more likely to be dominated by phosphoric acid) and completely gone by the lower haze. Also note that in none of the cloud decks are you "awash" in acid. They're acid mists, a few milligrams per cubic meter - similar to volcanic acid fogs or unscrubbed smogs on Earth. You could stand out in it (for a few hours, at least) if you had a full face mask on but otherwise no special protection (long term skin exposure to those levels however would cause dermatitis).

On the other hand, the mists are a huge *resource*. They're about 25% water to begin with, and H2SO4 heated breaks down first into H2O + SO3, and then with further heating the SO3 breaks down into SO2 and O2. So right there you have your two most important resources for a colony. There's a wide range of chemicals mixed into the mists, most of which are critical to establishing a local plastics industry, and are relatively easy to isolate and separate - the same heating system allows for fractional distillation, with an optional fractional crystallization step afterwards. So your habitat is PTFE with a ripstop (I'm preferential to UHMWPE, since it's one of the easier polymers to produce locally), and you have everything in your mists (and the air, for the Fischer-Tropsch/Sabatier hydrocarbon synthesis) to produce every step of the way - even the HF. After passing the hydrocarbons through an alkalai/rare earth catalyst bed at 20-60 bar and 500-900K, or a SAPO catalyst bed at 1-3 bar, 850K, you can recover alkenes; ethylene of course goes through a Zeigler-Natta catalyst at 1-3 bar / 300-320K to make UHMWPE, while the propylene goes into the SOHIO process (0,5-2 bar, 700-800k), mainly to recover the acrylonitrile fraction, which is polymerized (low pressure and temperature) and wet spun to make PAN, which is then oxidized and then carbonized to produce carbon fiber. Your other hydrocarbon fractions are turned back into syngas and fed back into your hydrocarbon synthesis. As for the PTFE side of the equation, there's significant HCl in the mists, which the Deacon process converts to Cl2,which is then used for the chlorination of methane to make chloroform (about 700K). This then is fluorinated at high temperatures and low pressures, fed into a neutralizaton stage (which involves sodium hydroxide recycled by the chloralkali process), then polymerized to PTFE. For your plants your nitrates are of course made nitric acid by the Haber and then Ostwald process; all local wastes are incinerated and the ash neutralized with the nitric acid, so your cations are recovered. Additional sulfates, phosphates, etc are abundantly available locally. Even iron is likely available in limited quantities; one of the Venera probes detected iron during its descent, and ferric chloride is considered a likely component of the cloud deck (possibly as a significant part of the mystery UV absorber). This would be left as a precipitate in the initial mist distillation stage.

I'm oversimplifying to a great degree here, mind you, but that's the basic layout for a starter industrial base on a Venus colony. It's amazing how much is available in the cloud decks, sucked right in through your motors (that you need to resist the meridional drift) and quite hygroscopic, so readily absorbed if you duct the thrust across absorption beds. You can also get even more if you're willing to spend the power (and ship the mass) for a cooling system to cool the interior air to below ambient, and then collect the condensation that runs down the habitat. Oh yeah, I probably forgot to mention that normal Earth air is a lifting gas on Venus... you live *inside* the envelope. More specifically, near the top, as you need the ballonets near the bottom for stability, you reduce the

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[Maritz]

Thanks for that man. I'll probably be back having a nosey at that again later. ;)

Re:Keep your fingers crossed

[Anonymous Coward]

And why is it that the Russians do well with Venusian missions, but struggle with Martian missions? Do they identify, at some visceral level, with a dangerous and cloudy planet? Does their classic design philosophy of 'simple but tough' mesh better with the Venus mission profile?

Mars again?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they succeed (Mars destroys quite a few probes), but why Mars. We pretty much know that there is no surface life there and nothing we're sending has much chance of observing subsurface life. It will most likely take quite an expedition (humans, large drilling equipment, extended mission, etc) to find any life that exists/has existed on Mars and even then the only thing we're likely to find are some simple soil bacteria and/or fossils. There are several other Planets/Moons that have conditions that might support current "surface" life that we have barely even scratched the surface of yet for some reason we keep throwing probe after probe towards a freeze dried rock. Take a bit of a break on Mars until we (hopefully in the next few decades) get some boots on the ground and send some surface probes elsewhere.

Re:Mars again?

[Maritz]

We pretty much know that there is no surface life there and nothing we're sending has much chance of observing subsurface life.

Look at you, substituting opinion for fact. You've answered your own question. We don't fucking know.

Re:Mars again?

[Rei]

In case you haven't noticed, Mars drains the lion's share of the exploration dollars these days.

It's kind of weird, really - we're far more obsessed with Mars now that we know it's a perchlorate-laden organics-destroying corrosive silicosis-risk hexavalent-chromium-laden dustscape than we were back when for all we knew there was life just sitting there on the surface. It's totally disproportionate to what we know of our solar system. If the goal was to find life, we'd be prioritizing Enceladus, whose oceans (containing a known potential energy source, H2) gush out into space for easy pickup by spacecraft. If the goal was to settle, we'd be priorizing Venus, which offers earthlike gravity, earthlike pressures, earthlike temperatures, requires no radiation protection, provides vast amounts of living space (pressure vessels = small, cramped per unit mass), vast amounts (well surpassing Earth) of energy (solar, wind), and for which all of the components of a plastics industry (and probably small steel industry as well, based on the evidence for FeCl3/FeCl2) get blown through your engines in a highly hygroscopic form from which water and oxygen can be recovered by mere heating and filtering. Meanwhile, you're sitting over a potential treasure trove where high heat, pressure and acids have been extracting minerals for rocks and concentrating them for billions of years, a region with pressures only 8% that of the deepest oceans on Earth and temperatures that can be - and have been, on 1960s Soviet tech - withstood by simple thermal inertia - and from which dredged materials can be hauled up by phase change balloon (rigid metal, contracting metal, Zylon, possibly others).

Re:Mars again?

[vikingpower]

OP here. Truly a shame that ESA didn't ask for your opinion before committing to this program, right ? Next time I'm in Darmstadt, Germany, I'll tell them to take any AC opinions on /. into serious account before launching, because, you know, science.

Re:Mars again?

[slashping]

Venus, which offers earthlike gravity, earthlike pressures, earthlike temperatures

Not on the surface, though. And the atmosphere is boring.

Re:Mars again?

[Kjella]

If the goal was to settle, we'd be priorizing Venus, which offers (...) temperatures that can be - and have been, on 1960s Soviet tech - withstood by simple thermal inertia

...for minutes. No probe has lasted even an hour on the surface, while Opportunity is running for the 13th year and counting on Mars. It's a lot more robot friendly which might be even more important than if it's human-friendly.

Re:Mars again?

[Rei]

What is boring about an atmosphere of a planet that contains iron in it? Venus's atmosphere is fascinating - it contains vastly more material diversity than Earth's, stratified into its different layers. Near the surface the harsh conditions extract metals as gaseous chlorides and fluorides, out of surfaces that appear as if molten rock - probably things like kimberlites and carbonatites - flowed like rivers. Most of the atmosphere is dynamically stable, like Earth's stratosphere, although the middle cloud - the habitable layer - has some degree of convection, like a mild version of Earth's troposphere. Near the poles there's a crazy freaky looking storm, although we have no clue at this point at what layers, if any, it'd be hazardous in and at what layers, if any, it'd be safe in. Lightning on Venus appears to be at least as common on Earth, but it's... weird. We're having trouble interpreting the data we've gotten so far, which has led to weird theories such as lightning bolts hundreds of kilometers long (probably not) to electrostatic "traps" that echo static from lightning around the planet, to layers of the Hadesphere that deliver a static shock to objects descending through them. But lightning flashes have never been observed, so it may not exist in the upper layers at all. Venus has crazy stratified winds that rotate much faster than the planet, leading to a "day" that's nearly an Earth week near the equator but only two days at 70 degrees latitude and even shorter the further toward the poles you go. The velocities are highly stratified by altitude, leading to great potential for wind energy. The atmosphere holds tons of mysteries still, like whether the "night glow" is real and if so what it is, or what it is that makes up the "mystery UV absorber" that soaks up most of the UV light in Venus's upper atmosphere (a benefit Martians could only wish for)

Not boring at all. It's one of if not the most interesting atmospheres in the solar system.

It would be possible to have a habitat descend below the lower cloud deck (indeed, the lower cloud layer appears to be somewhat uneven in thickness and may have gaps altogether) for short periods, wherein one could see the ground with their own eyes. Yet at the polar vortex the sky clears up at such a low height that a high colony could potentially see the stars. The ground is accessible by probes, and looks to be quite a mineral wealth - but the real life is in the clouds. Not only to fuel industry, but basically you're living in a floating Garden of Eden over Hell: vast amounts of space to live in (unlike a pressure vessel on Mars, which due to how heavy pressure vessels are, will always be very space limited), always temperate, tons of sunlight to fuel the growth of whatever tropical plants one desires, and easy buoyancy to lift a lot of them. Space on a scale that a popular recreational activity might be indoor skydiving onto the safety netting. You can even step outside and touch the atmosphere with your bare skin (just not for too long). Feel an alien wind.

For impersonal reasons, a colony there is not just appealing from the perspective of a no-mining-needed industrial basis, but also from a science basis; there's far more scientific reason to have humans on Venus than on Mars. And not just because we know far less about our "evil twin" than we do about Mars. On Mars, it makes basically no difference if you leave a robotic probe sitting around recharging its batteries in the weak sunlight while it awaits commands. You can't do that on Venus's surface. You have limited time on the surface with each dive before you have to rise to cool down and recharge; latency really does matter.

Re:Mars again?

[Rei]

Wrong. Even the first one to land successfully, Venera 7, lasted for 23 minutes. And that was after a long descent. Venera 8 lasted 50 minutes. Venera 9, 53. Venera 10, 65. Venera 11, 95. Venera 12, 110 minutes. And these were rather cheap Soviet probes, hardly a dedicated system designed for long-term surface operations. Yet one doesn't need to stay on the surface for a long time if you have a local habitat. You descent, gather information and samples, return to altitude (actually to higher than when you left, to catch up), dock and deliver, then return to the surface. Each hop lets you explore a different part of the planet - something Mars rover operators could only dream of. Such a Venus program could sample and analyze the entire planet's surface.

Re:Mars again?

[slashping]

Not boring at all. It's one of if not the most interesting atmospheres in the solar system.

Compared to other atmospheres yes, but not compared to walking on the ground.

look elsewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no traces of life in the European economy.

leave him there.

[Thud457]

pish posh this is all a bunch of Hollywood claptrap.

NASA has no plans to rescue Matt Damon from Mars.
Never has and never will.

Which gives me, for one, some good degree of satisfaction.

Biggest news in TFA

[whodunit]

"The Russian-made launch vehicle lobbed a probe into space." No explosion, no failure to orbit. But that might be because the payload stage wasn't Russian?

Mars recalled our chocolate bars!

[ffkom]

And now we want them back (and have a look right where they are made why they put plastic into them). http://www.theguardian.com/lif...