BERLIN — Europe’s experimental Mars probe hit the right spot — but at the wrong speed — and may have ended up in a fiery ball of rocket fuel when it struck the surface, scientists said Friday.
Pictures taken by a NASA satellite show a black spot in the area where the Schiaparelli lander was meant to touch down Wednesday, the European Space Agency said. The images end two days of speculation following the probe’s unexpected radio silence less than a minute before the planned landing.
“Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between (1.4 and 2.4 miles), therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than (186 mph),” the agency said.
It said the large disturbance captured in the NASA photographs may have been caused by the probe’s steep crash-landing, which would have sprayed matter around like a blast site on Earth.
“It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full,” the agency said.
Schiaparelli was designed to test technology for a more ambitious European Mars landing in 2020. The European Space Agency said the probe’s mother ship was successfully placed into orbit Wednesday and will soon begin analyzing the Martian atmosphere in search for evidence of life.
“In my heart, of course I’m sad that we couldn’t land softly on the surface of Mars,” ESA chief Jan Woerner told The Associated Press. “But the main part of the mission is the science that will be done by the orbiter.”
Woerner said engineers received a wealth of data from the lander before the crash that will prove valuable for the next attempt in four years’ time. He described the mission as “a 96 percent success.”
Still, the crash-landing was a painful reminder of how hard it is to put a spacecraft on the surface of the red planet.
Its resting place was photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which also spotted Europe’s last ill-fated mission to the surface of the planet. The Beagle 2 probe landed on Mars in 2003 but failed to deploy its solar panels properly, preventing it from functioning.
