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Euro Mars angst

Last week, the European Space Agency lost contact with the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander during its harrowing six-minute descent to the Martian surface. Many days later, the Schiaparelli lander is still silent and its exact location still unknown, but its mission to gather valuable atmospheric data needed to ensure a successful landing for the Martian rover the ESA plans to send to Mars in 2020 was not a failure. Valuable information was gathered during the descent.

Still, much of its mission was accomplished. ESA has a lot of data to pore over to prep for the automated Mars rover mission that will aggressively seek out signs that life once existed on the planet. A soft landing last week would have been infinitely preferable to the hard landing, but even failures are instructive when it comes to space exploration. Don't cry for the Europeans. They're just getting started.

Editorial on 10/27/2016

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