page_title: Schiaparelli EDM
section_title: Crash
hierarchical_section_title: Schiaparelli EDM / Entry, descent, and landing events sequence / Crash
caption_attribution_description: English: On Nov. 1, 2016, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observed the impact site of Europe's Schiaparelli test lander, gaining the first color view of the site since the lander's Oct. 19, 2016, arrival. These cutouts from the observation cover three locations where parts of the spacecraft reached the ground: the lander module itself in the upper portion, the parachute and back shell at lower left, and the heat shield at lower right. The heat shield location was outside of the area covered in color. The scale bar of 10 meters (32.8 feet) applies to all three cutouts. Schiaparelli was one component of the European Space Agency's ExoMars 2016 project, which placed the Trace Gas Orbiter into orbit around Mars on the same arrival date. The ExoMars project received data from Schiaparelli during its descent through the atmosphere. ESA reports that the heat shield separated as planned, the parachute deployed as planned but was released (with back shell) prematurely, and the lander hit the ground at a velocity of more than 180 miles per hour (more than 300 kilometers per hour). Information gained from the Nov. 1 observation supplements what was learned from an Oct. 25 HiRISE observation, at PIA21131, which also shows the locations of these three cutouts relative to each other. Where the lander module struck the ground, dark radial patterns that extend from a dark spot are interpreted as "ejecta," or material thrown outward from the impact, which may have excavated a shallow crater. From the earlier image, it was not clear whether the relatively bright pixels and clusters of pixels scattered around the lander module's impact site are fragments of the module or image noise. Now it is clear that at least the four brightest spots near the impact are not noise. These bright spots are in the same location in the two images and have a white color, unusual for this region of Mars. The module may have broken up at impact, and some fragments might have been thrown outward like impact ejecta. The parachute has a different shape in the Nov. 1 image than in the Oct. 25 one, apparently from shifting in the wind. Similar shifting was observed in the parachute of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission during the first six months after the Mars arrival of that mission's Curiosity rover in 2012 [PIA16813]. At lower right are several bright features surrounded by dark radial impact patterns, located where the heat shield was expected to impact. The bright spots appear identical in the Nov. 1 and Oct. 25 images, which were taken from different angles, so these spots are now interpreted as bright material, such as insulation layers, not glinting reflections. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace &amp; Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
context_page_description: Schiaparelli EDM was a failed Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module of the ExoMars programme—a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos. It was built in Italy and was intended to test technology for future soft landings on the surface of Mars. It also had a limited but focused science payload that would have measured atmospheric electricity on Mars and local meteorological conditions.
  Launched together with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on 14 March 2016, Schiaparelli attempted a landing on 19 October 2016. Telemetry signals from Schiaparelli, monitored in real time by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India, were lost about one minute from the surface during the final landing stages. On 21 October 2016, NASA released an image by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing what appears to be the lander's crash site. The telemetry data accumulated and relayed by ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Express were used to investigate the failure modes of the landing technology employed.
context_section_description: The Schiaparelli lander attempted an automated landing on 19 October 2016, but the signal was unexpectedly lost a short time before the planned landing time. ESA's Mars Express and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and MAVEN continued listening for the lander's signal to no avail.
  Schiaparelli transmitted about 600 megabytes of telemetry during its landing attempt, and detailed analysis found that its atmospheric entry occurred normally, with the parachute deploying at 12 km (7.5 mi) and 1,730 km/h (1,070 mph), and its heat shield releasing at 7.8 km (4.8 mi). However, the lander's inertial measurement unit, which measures rotation, became saturated (unable to take higher readings) for about one second. This saturation, coupled with data from the navigation computer, generated an altitude reading that was negative, or below ground level. This caused the premature release of the parachute and back shell. The braking thrusters then fired for about three seconds rather than the expected 30 seconds, followed by the activation of ground systems as if the vehicle had already landed. In reality, it was still at an altitude of 3.7 km (2.3 mi). The lander continued transmitting for 19 seconds after the thrusters cut off; the loss of signal occurred 50 seconds before it was supposed to land. Schiaparelli impacted the Martian surface at 540 km/h (340 mph), near terminal velocity.
  A day after the attempted landing, the Context Camera of NASA's MRO identified new ground markings due to the lander's impact and parachute. The crash site is about 54 km (~33.5 miles) from where the active NASA Mars rover Opportunity was at the time of the landing. On 27 October 2016, ESA released high resolution images of the crash site taken by the MRO HiRISE camera on 25 October 2016. The front heatshield, module impact site, and the rear heat-shield and parachute are identified. It is thought that the crater is about half a metre (yard) deep and it may be possible to further study this crater at a later time. On a related note, an artificially made crater was actually the goal of the THOR mission proposed under the Mars Scout program that produced Phoenix and MAVEN, the goal was sub-surface excavation. That mission was passed over, but another orbiter was able to discover naturally occurring fresh impact craters, and ice was found in them.
  Although the lander crashed, ESA officials declared Schiaparelli a success because it had fulfilled its primary function of testing the landing system for the 2020 Kazachok lander and returning telemetry data during its descent. By 20 October, the bulk of the descent data had been returned to Earth and was being analysed. Unlike the Beagle 2 lander, which was not heard from again after being released from Mars Express in 2003, the Exomars module transmitted during descent so data collected and transmitted on the way down was not lost if the spacecraft was destroyed on impact.
  An investigation that concluded in May 2017 revealed that, at that time, the lander deployed its parachute and then began spinning unexpectedly fast. This superfast rotation briefly saturated Schiaparelli's spin-measuring instrument, which resulted in a large attitude-estimation error by the guidance, navigation and control-system software. This resulted in the computer calculating that it was below ground level, triggering the early release of the parachute and backshell, a brief firing of the thrusters for only 3 seconds instead of 30 seconds, and the activation of the on-ground system as if Schiaparelli had landed.
  Images of module's crash site suggested that a fuel tank may have exploded in the impact. It is estimated that the lander impacted the surface at about 300 km/h (83 m/s; 190 mph). Additional imaging of the site by November further confirmed the identity of the spacecraft's parts. The additional imaging was in colour and it was noted that parachute was slightly shifted.
  By taking more images using a technique called super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) the resolution can be improved, and this was done for the formerly lost 
caption: HiRISE observations of the crash site on 1 November 2016, detailing what is thought to be the main spacecrafts impact location, the lower heat shield, and upper heat shield and parachute.[78] With this second observation, it is noted that wind seems to have shifted the parachute, and some of bright spots around the crash zone were confirmed to be from material not image noise or momentary reflections.[78]
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