Sentences with phrase «gas orbiter»

The European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is making its first scientific observations on Mars.

«This is a major milestone for our ExoMars programme, and a fantastic achievement for Europe,» says Pia Mitschdoerfer, Trace Gas Orbiter mission manager.

The Mars Camera, officially known as CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System), aboard the European Space Agency «s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) captured its first high resolution images of...

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will use a neutron detector — the Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector or FREND — to map subsurface hydrogen to a depth of 1 m to reveal deposits of water - ice hidden just below the surface.

The Trace Gas Orbiter has reached its final orbit after a year of «aerobraking» that ended in February.This exciting operation saw the craft skimming through the very top of the upper atmosphere, using drag on its solar wings to transform its initial highly elliptical four - day orbit of about 200 x 98 000 km into the final, much lower and near - circular path at about 400 km.

The Trace Gas Orbiter can detect and analyse methane and other trace gases even in extremely low concentrations, with an improved accuracy of three orders of magnitude over previous measurements.

NASA contributed two Electra radio communications systems to the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (European Space Agency) and assisted with the navigation, tracking and data return of the spacecraft.

The Trace Gas Orbiter completed the first two burns Wednesday and Saturday, according to Håkan Svedhem, TGO's project scientist at the European Space Agency.

The ESA / Roscosmos Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is mere weeks away from commencing its atmospheric search for evidence of recent geological activity, and possibly life on everyone's favorite Red Planet.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a Russian - launched, European - built spacecraft that arrived at Mars in October, is starting to dip into the upper reaches of the red planet's atmosphere in a year - long «aerobraking» campaign place the observatory in the right position to hunt for methane, an indicator of potential biological activity.

With its four instruments capable of sniffing out hydrocarbons like methane in less than 1 % of the atmosphere, the Trace Gas Orbiter will start to answer those questions once ExoMars has maneuvered into position to peer through the Martian atmosphere for signs of breathing microbes, active geology, or, possibly, both.

The Nili Fossae region is thought to be one of the potential source regions for transient methane gas in the Martian atmosphere that the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is hoping to detect, characterise and determine its origins.

The Trace Gas Orbiter, or TGO, a joint endeavour between ESA and Roscosmos, arrived at Mars on 19 October.

In the first phase that launched in March, Schiaparelli shared a ride with the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which will search the martian atmosphere for methane and other gases that could signal life.

The detailed telemetry recorded by the Trace Gas Orbiter was needed to better understand the situation.

Meanwhile, ESA reports that the Trace Gas Orbiter — the main scientific rationale for the ExoMars 2016 mission — is in good health, and is set to begin slowly lowering the altitude of its orbit so that it can begin looking for methane and other gases that could signal life on Mars.

After MAVEN, the next potential relay to launch will be the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which won't arrive at the Red Planet until late 2016.

It was launched with the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in March and has already travelled just under half of its nearly 500 million km journey.

Its Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), the first prong of a multipart ExoMars mission, appears to have been captured into its planned orbit around Mars and is working normally.

Despite the disappointments, there is a silver lining to this latest dark patch on Mars: The ExoMars program's other main component, a satellite called the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) that served as Schiaparelli's mother ship, successfully entered Mars's orbit after deploying the lander.

The story begins with a 2008 agreement between NASA and ESA to share the costs of sending the Trace Gas Orbiter to Mars in a 2016 mission, followed by a European rover and a U.S. rover in 2018.

Upon arrival in October, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) will train its instruments on the Red Planet, in the hopes of resolving questions about the existence of methane gas, and whether it could hint at microbial life.

The first ExoMars mission, the Trace Gas Orbiter, launched this past March, and will attempt to nail down the existence and source of methane gas, which has mysteriously come and gone over the years.

Not exact matches

The rover's instruments have found no traces of the gas, in contrast to some previous observations made by Red Planet orbiters.

The initial 2016 phase of the mission would carry an orbiter designed to sniff out possible sources of methane and other trace gases that might signal the presence of microbial life on Mars.

While space agencies are planning to send more orbiters to study Jupiter and its moons in the next decade, probes remain impractical because the gas planet has no solid surface to land on.

The Nili Fossae region is important to the ExoMars 2016 TGO mission as it is thought to be one of the potential source regions for transient methane gas in the Martian atmosphere that the other instruments on the orbiter is hoping to detect, characterize and determine its origins.

Scheduled to arrive at the planet Mars this October, this first part of the ExoMars program, consisting of an orbiter and lander, will search for gases in the Martian atmosphere that could indicate signatures of active biological or geological processes, while also testing key entry, descent and landing technologies to support future ESA missions to Mars.

The orbiter's chief objective is to tease out the trace constituents of the Martian atmosphere, particularly methane, a gas detected intermittently over the last decade that scientists think could be produced by microbes or undiscovered ongoing geological activity.

Methane has been difficult to detect from Earth or the current generation of Mars orbiters because the gas exists on Mars only in traces, if at all.

Though there was never any danger of Siding Spring colliding with Mars or any of the orbiters, its tail contained gas and fine dust particles that, when they hit the Martian atmosphere and vaporized, caused what was probably a spectacular meteor shower, though one that no one could see except for the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers.

In particular, the orbiter will seek evidence of methane and other gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological activity.