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

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: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).