Europe and Russia are about to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars so that it can sniff out potential alien life—in this case, literally, as it is tasked with “smelling” what may be gaseous proof that life once existed on the planet.
The project, known as ExoMars 2016, is a two-phase collaborative project between the European Space Agency and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. Currently, an orbiter known as the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is slated to take off at 5:31 am EST (9:31 GMT) on Monday from Kazakhstan. After being launched by a Russian Proton rocket, it will begin its 308 million mile (496 million kilometer) journey to Mars, where it will arrive on October 19th.
TGO’s main mission when it arrives? To photograph Mars and use its array of high-tech instruments to determine “whether Mars is ‘alive’ today,” according to the European Space Agency.
Watch the livestream here beginning at 5:00am EST :
The Red Planet is particularly enigmatic in terms of its gasses because of the levels of methane it contains in its atmosphere. Normally, methane is destroyed by ultraviolet radiation within a few hundred years of its creation—implying that methane is somehow still being produced today. Of course, methane can be produced by geological chemical processes involving hot liquid water under the planet’s surface. Or, it could be the product of a biological process—like microbes leading to the decomposition of organic material.
The TGO, then, aims to analyze the methane on Mars in an attempt to figure out where it’s coming from.
“TGO will be like a big nose in space,” said Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist.
Of course, TGO brings with it another important aspect of the plan: A module known as Schiaparelli, which is designed to test heat shields and parachutes for the sake of phase two of the ESA-Russia mission—landing a rover on Mars.
Credit: ESA
But after Schiaparelli lands on the planet surface, its job won’t be done: It will then measure atmospheric particles, winds speeds, and temperatures on Mars. TGO meanwhile is slated to continue its mission until December 2017, although it has enough fuel to last years beyond that.
Phase two, though—which is set to launch in 2018—may never get off the ground: “We need some more money,” said ESA director general Jan Woerner, who hypothesized a possible two-year delay in launching the rover thanks to cost increases.
Regardless, though, phase one is set to launch Monday, and may bring us exciting news yet.
“Establishing whether life ever existed on Mars, even at a microbial level, remains one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time,” said the ESA, “and one that lies at the heart of the ExoMars programme.”
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Image credit:ESA/Roscosmos
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