Off the wire
• Zimbabwe pushes to amend mining law to attract investors  • Chinese court to determine compensation for wrongful conviction  • Chinese, Japanese FMs discuss bilateral ties, Korean Peninsula nuclear issue  • Finnish FM says about 100 Finns have joined IS: media  • Experts urge U.S. to stop politicizing human rights  • Xinhua world news summary at 1530 GMT, March 14  • Measles outbreak kills more than 10 children in Mongolia  • Moscow urges participants of Syrian talks not to "fan tensions"  • Shanghai, Dubai art bodies agree to step up design exchanges  • Death toll from Cote d'Ivoire resort attack hits 18  
You are here: 　 Home

Russia, EU launch joint Mars mission

Xinhua, March 14, 2016 Adjust font size:

The first stage of Russian-European joint mission aimed to search for presence of life on Mars began Monday, said Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency.

The space vehicles of the mission, named Exo-Mars, successfully separated from the third stage of the Russian Proton-M rocket carrier, which blasted into space earlier in the day from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Roscosmos said.

The primary goal of the program, a joint endeavor of Roscosmos and the European Space Agency, is to address the question of whether life has ever existed on Mars through searching for methane and other atmospheric gases, which could be signatures of biological or geological processes.

The program has two stages: the launch of an orbital probe to Mars in 2016 and a robotic landing rover in 2018.

The first stage would witness the placement of an orbital module named Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in the orbit of the Mars, while a lander named Schiaparelli would be used to test landing technologies to prepare for the second stage.

Schiaparelli is scheduled to separate from the TGO and land in October. Endi