THE last time Europeans tried to land on Mars it was a disaster: the European Space Agency’s Beagle 2 probe simply crashed on the Red Planet. So ESA is getting ready to redress this. On Monday it said it has learned lessons from Beagle 2 for its ExoMars mission, which will look for chemical signs of life on Mars.
After a two-year journey following its launch in 2011, the spacecraft will use parachutes, retrorockets and airbags to soft-land. Then it will release a rover to roam across the planet.
“The European Mars rover will be more autonomous than NASA’s robots”…
