ExoMars - Schiaparelli landing Options

[Phil Stooke]

Starting a new topic here - hopefully that's OK! Clearly there will be a lot of action around this in the next weeks and months with descent images and HiRISE views of the hardware.

I thought I had posted this map earlier but apparently not. This shows the various landing ellipses in this area. The original plan was for an ellipse oriented NW-SE, but it changed with the different launch date and is now nearly E-W. Note that the ellipse shown in the recent ESA release is the envelope of all ellipses over a given launch period, but the actual landing ellipse for the given launch date is smaller. Opportunity's final landing ellipse is shown for comparison.

http://exploration.esa.int/mars/57445-exom...6-landing-site/

http://exploration.esa.int/mars/57446-exom...6-landing-site/

Phil

[siravan]

One of the difficulties of landing on Mars (among others) is the inability to do a full EDL rehearsal on Earth. Software verification and validation is all well and good, but if you cannot test your system in its entirety, all bets are off. We just don't know what happened (yet), it could be a subtle logical error only apparent in Mars environment or a simple error like the big-endian/little-endian mix up that doomed MGS. However, the whole point of Schiaparelli EDM lander was an end-to-end testing of the EDL system, and as such, it was a very successful test.