Life-sniffing ExoMars Orbiter begins long voyage to Mars
Martian life detector ExoMars, a joint venture by Russia and the European Space Agency (ESA), has begun its seven-month-long voyage to the Red Planet to sniff out finest signatures of extraterrestrial life, particularly through finding likely origins of the planet’s methane, by an orbital survey of the planet. Decades after expecting little alien green men on Mars, scientists now confine themselves to trace microbial life, if any, on Mars so that they can understand the earliest history of life on the Earth through inspecting the status quo of “The Angry Red Planet”.
The ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) together with its sibling, a landing module called Schiaparelli, was sent to Mars by the might of a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 15:31 local time (0931 GMT) on Monday, to reach our next door world after travelling 496 million kilometers (308 million miles).
“It’s been a long journey getting the first ExoMars mission to the launch pad, but thanks to the hard work and dedication of our international teams, a new era of Mars exploration is now within our reach,” Johann-Dietrich Wörner, the ESA director general, said in a statement.
The signals received from TGO, minutes after lift-off, showed that the craft was in good health and had already unfurled its solar wings to get fuel for its long journey.
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