Schiaparelli Crashed and (Possibly) Burned
Wasn’t sure whether to mention this on here these days or not, and if so exactly how to approach the matter, but the blog post by ESA Director General Jan Woerner was infuriating enough to make me make up my mind. I mean, seriously now? TGO needs to use aerobraking to settle into its long-term orbit and then has several years of planned mission ahead, while Schiaparelli was supposed to perform a semi-soft landing and then operate for a number of days on the surface, yet after just achieving orbit insertion with TGO and, according to them, receiving 80% of Schiaparelli’s descent data, the claim is that the TGO part of the mission is 100% successful and the Schiaparelli part 80% successful, making for a total success rate of 96%, since TGO is seen as having 80% of the importance.
That’s the sort of dreadful attempt at painting a failure in positive colors that makes it worse than simply keeping quiet and letting everyone think you’re to embarrassed to comment. Did he by any chance forget how many things can go wrong over all those years to prevent the orbiter mission from being 100% successful? Or that Schiaparelli was also supposed to send some information from the surface for a while? Or, you know, that the landing procedure was supposed to be a test for the one to be used for the future rover, yet it resulted in the lander likely smashing into the surface at over 300 km/h and possibly also exploding on impact? Does that sound, or look, since it would appear we have pictures as well, 80% successful to you?
Unless you count those few seconds of data returned by the Mars 3 lander, NASA remains the only space agency to have managed to operate spacecraft on the surface of Mars. And even if you do count them, it definitely remains the only one to have had successful surface missions on the red planet. Which, especially once you also remember that NASA was supposed to take part in this mission but had to pull out due to budget constraints, merely serves to once again make me ask why do we still have separate and at times still competing space agencies instead of pooling the resources and the expertise available everywhere and making this a true project of humankind, at the global scale, gathering personnel, discoveries, experience and technology from everywhere, sharing it all and funding this properly as a single program aimed at exploring and inspiring, looking up at the sky instead of staring at our feet as we stumble in the dirt, seeking to learn for the sake of knowledge itself and to reach ever more distant and more intriguing places merely because they exist.
