News archive

News archive

If youre travelling on Europe's roads this year, you may spot a very large vehicle (5m long and 3.5m wide), bearing the Mars Express logo. It will be making slow progress and will be accompanied by a police escort. Inside the clean, air-conditioned environment will be the Mars Express spacecraft in transit between industrial contractors in Switzerland, the UK, Italy or France.
Published: 13 March 2001
To be launched in 2005Note that the briefing for the Call for Ideas for the re-use of the Mars Express platform will take place on 23 March 2001, in Paris Headquarters, room Cinema, from 13h00 to 15h00.The search for more efficiency is a constant concern of the Science Directorate since the initiation of the Horizon 2000 programme. As shown to ESA's SSAC and SPC, a number of scientific missions have led to considerable savings achieved by adopting newmanagement procedures, exploiting cheaper industrial costs (especially the re-using platforms or subsystems developed for the other missions), and accessing cheaper launchers.
Published: 9 March 2001
International collaboration between Europe and Japan took a step forward last month when scientists building instruments for ESA's Mars Express mission travelled to Japan for a meeting with their counterparts on Nozomi, the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science's (ISAS) mission to Mars.
Published: 25 February 2001
Report of 'Mars City' Competition opening event in Brielle, 2nd of February.Ex-astronaut Wubbo Ockels arrived at his old primary school in Brielle, Holland, in a school milk truck with the very first 'Mars City' competition package last Friday.
Published: 8 February 2001
Wubbo Ockels invites junior school children to take part in the ESA 'Mars City' competition.
Published: 31 January 2001
The spacecraft ESA will send to Mars in 2003 is now well and truly under construction. Last week, engineers at Contraves, Zurich, Switzerland were celebrating the readiness of the Mars Express flight structure to undergo tests to ensure that it meets its design requirements. "The tests are starting on time. If you look at our planning from the beginning of the programme, we're keeping to the schedule. It's extremely pleasing," says Don McCoy who is responsible for assembly, integration and verification for Mars Express at ESTEC.
Published: 30 January 2001
Published: 30 January 2001
The Mars Express lander, Beagle 2, will land on Isidis Planitia, a large flat region that overlies the boundary between the ancient highlands and the northern plains. The choice of site was announced last week at a meeting of the Mars Express science working team in ESTEC, Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
Published: 19 December 2000
The nineteenth century spirit of discovery is inspiring the effort to land the first probe on Mars in the twenty first century. Last week, as if to give the inspiration a boost, the largely-British team building the Beagle 2 lander for Mars Express held the second meeting for 'adjunct' scientists in one of the finest nineteenth century monuments to discoveries about life on Earth - the Natural History Museum in London.
Published: 14 December 2000
Starting with Mars Express and Beagle 2 and ending with a possible Sample Return Mission, Europe will be making a major contribution to Mars exploration over the next two decades. Europe's plans complement the new programme recently announced by NASA in the wake of last year's mission losses.
Published: 21 November 2000
It's fewer than 40 years since the first spacecraft to visit Mars, the Mariners, finally demonstrated that there are no canals or thick vegetation on the planet. Since then, our knowledge about Mars has grown dramatically with every subsequent visit by a successful space mission.
Published: 1 November 2000
Europe's mission to Mars is assuming a tangible form at the Astrium SAS (formerly MMS) integration facilities in Toulouse, France. "We're down to the real work. It's not paperwork anymore - it's a real spacecraft," says Vincent Poinsignon, Mars Express project manager at Astrium SAS.
Published: 17 August 2000
Two landers are due to descend to the surface of Mars within a month of each other in late 2003, early 2004. Last week, NASA announced that it would be sending a rover to the red planet. Beagle 2, the Mars Express lander, is due to take up its position on the Martian surface about one month before NASA's rover lands.
Published: 1 August 2000
A series of new articles about the Mars Express instruments is now available on this web site. Based on interviews with Principal Investigators, the articles describe the instruments and the science they plan to accomplish.
Published: 25 July 2000
Scientists building instruments for Mars Express are taking delivery this month of a software package to help them plan how and when to operate their instruments during each of the 2293 orbits the spacecraft will make during its first 687 Earth-days of operation. "The mission has to be planned orbit by orbit: there's no other way. STAT (Science Timeline Analysis Tool) is a very comprehensive software package for planning science operations," says Agustin Chicarro, Mars Express project scientist.
Published: 25 July 2000
"The latest evidence that liquid water has flowed on Mars very recently, makes Mars Express even more relevant," says Agustin Chicarro, Mars Express Project Scientist. "Water may have flowed tens of thousands or a million years ago - that's still recent in geological terms. Or it may even be flowing now. Either way, this is very important."
Published: 23 June 2000
Where to land?If you're going to send a lander to look for life on Mars, you need to choose a landing site with a good chance of harbouring life - preferably a place where water once deposited layers of sediment. "But even with MOC data (MOC is the high resolution camera on board NASA's Mars Global Surveyor), we don't know exactly which kind of environment we're going to meet," Gian Ori from the Universita d'Annunzio, Pescara, Italy told a session of the European Geophysical Society's millennium conference in Nice, France, last week (25-29 April 2000).
Published: 3 May 2000
Mars Express on target and forging links with JapanProgress on building the Mars Express spacecraft is proceeding according to plan. We are following our schedule, Rudi Schmidt, Mars Express project manager, said last week at a science working team meeting attended mainly by scientists who are building payload instruments.
Published: 17 April 2000
The first Soyuz-Fregat launch vehicle, of the type that will launch Mars Express in June 2003, was launched successfully from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan today.
Published: 8 February 2000
The Beagle 2 team has selected two potential landing sites on Mars for further study. In the latest issue of the Beagle 2 Bulletin, John Bridges from the Natural History Museum, London, who is leading the landing site study, writes: "The prospective areas are within the Chryse and Tritonis Lacus regions. Both are at low elevation, which gives more opportunity for the parachutes to brake the descent of Beagle 2. The latitude of the two sites, about 190N, means that the mission will begin during the Martian late spring, when there is more solar energy to charge batteries and nighttime temperatures are relatively high, making it easier to keep the spacecraft warm.
Published: 25 January 2000
28-Mar-2024 13:17 UT

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