Russia, ESA to send sniffing orbiter to find life on Mars

It all started in 1877 when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars which he called “canali” – meaning channels – but was mistranslated into English as canals and hence a rolling wave of speculations about the possibility of intelligent life on the Red Planet rose. Although Mariner 4 spacecraft refuted the idea of intelligently-designed canals during its flyby of our next door world in 1964, the pursuit of finding traces of life, at least in its microbial forms, has not ceased.

With the prospect of little green Martians debunked, astrobiologists are now focused to understand the history of life on Earth through an interplanetary study of its origins.

Since 1960, humans have launched over 50 unmanned missions to Mars, more than two dozen of which have ended in failure.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), scheduled to launch on Monday, is the latest in this long list and is supposed to sniff out extraterrestrial life from an orbital stance of the planet, considered as a window to the Earth’s past.

The ExoMars mission is a joint venture by Russia and the European Space Agency (ESA) that aims to carry out a detailed analysis of the planet’s atmospheric gases, focusing particularly life's strong signature, Methane.

Methane can either be produced via geological processes or biological ones and, according to ESA, TGO will analyze Mars' methane in more detail than any previous mission to determine its likely origin.

Designed by ESA, the TGO will be dispatched via a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 15:31 local time (09:31 GMT) and will arrive in Mars on October 19 after travelling 496 million kilometers (308 million miles) in seven months.

“The ExoMars Orbiter will be inserted into an elliptical orbit around Mars and then sweep through the atmosphere to finally settle into a circular, approximately 400 kilometers altitude orbit ready to conduct its scientific mission,” ESA said in a statement.

The mission will also dispatch a small landing module, called Schiaparelli, onto the surface to pave the way for a Mars rover set to be launched in 2018.

NASA’s landmark discovery of water on Mars, announced last September, has further generated enthusiasm among astrobiologists in search of alien life.

“Establishing whether life ever existed on Mars, even at a microbial level, remains one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time and one that lies at the heart of the ExoMars program,” ESA further said.

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