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.

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."

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

[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: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?

[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.