
The Mars lander Schiaparelli has crashed into the surface of Mars due to computer glitch.
Last month, a Mars lander had impacted the Red Planet at 335 miles/hour, instead of using a maneuver of landing. This happened because a computer glitch which caused the rover to crash because of a misjudgment in measuring altitude. Schiaparelli was sent to the Red Planet for a test-run. Another bigger ship was bound to be sent to search for signs of life. Unfortunately, the Mars lander crashed on October 19, before it was scheduled to touch the surface of the planet.
- A computer malfunction misjudged the calculations meant to establish the altitude of the rover.
- The Mars lander crashed into the surface of the Red Planet.
The European Space Agency has declared that a big part of the mission developed as it was scheduled to happen, except for this computer malfunction which caused the occurrence of wrong calculations. Thus, the rover impacted the planet due to the glitch which caused alterations in the previous measurements regarding altitude.
The navigation system was manipulated in such a way that its calculations demonstrated the craft was lower than it was, thus causing the crash to happen when the parachute was enforced prematurely. The European Space Agency has claimed that the glitch in the system generated a negative altitude, namely below the ground level. This altered calculations triggered the release of the backshell and the parachute but also the activation of the on-ground procedures, behaving as if Schiaparelli had landed.
However, against all claimed estimations and calculus, the space rover was situated at approximately 3.7 kilometers above the surface of the Red Planet. This rover was launched to accomplish its mission about seven years ago, and it traveled through space approximately five hundred million kilometers, being attached to the Trace Gas Orbiter. It departed the Orbiter when it was situated at almost a million kilometers above the surface of Mars when it launched for its independent mission to reach the planet’s surface.
The Schiaparelli project was estimated to have cost about $251 million. Scientists have determined that to enable a safe landing, the Mars lander was meant to diminish its speed from 21,000 km/hour to 0, also surviving the temperatures generated by an atmospheric slide which registered approximately 1,500 degrees Celsius.
This crash was categorized as being the second failed effort of the European Space Agency to touch the surface of the Red Planet. Back in 2003, when the first attempt happened, the Beagle 2 robot has vanished from after it detached from Mars Express spaceship.
Image courtesy of: wikipedia
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