Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission to the Red Planet.

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Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission: The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) are set to send a robotic probe to Mars today. Named “ExoMars 2016”, the ESA-Roscosmos mission is set to lift off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The satellite, Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), lifted off at 09:31 GMT.The probe will investigate whether the methane in the world’s atmosphere is coming from a geological source or is being produced by microbes.If all goes well, the two space powers expect to follow up this venture with a rover, to be assembled in the UK, which will drill into the surface.That could launch in 2018, or, as seems increasingly likely, in 2020.

Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission to the Red Planet.

Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission
Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission

TGO will make a detailed inventory of Mars’ atmospheric gases, with particular interest in rare gases like methane, which implies that there is an active, current source. “TGO aims to measure its geographical and seasonal dependence and help to determine whether it stems from a geological or biological source,” the ESA said in a statement. The mission is an orbiter that will map trace gases in the atmosphere of Mars, over an entire martian year (two Earth years).

Europe and Russia have launched a mission to the Red Planet.

Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission
Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission

 If all goes well this mission will be followed by a more ambitious ExoMars Rover, designed to test for traces of ancient life, that will launch after 2018. The orbiter is uniquely designed to map the minute constituents of the Martian atmosphere (such as methane), using a set of highly specialised spectroscopic and imaging instruments.

  “In 2016, at least five new missions are expected to be launched – a record for ESOC – plus two spectacular interplanetary highlights in the autumn: ExoMars arrival at Mars, and the controlled impact of Rosetta on its comet,” added Rolf Densing, ESA’s director for operations. “It is a finding that puts paid to the question of the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere but it does pose some other more complex and far-reaching questions, such as the nature of its sources,” explained Francisco Javier Martin-Torres from the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences (CSIC-UGR) at the University of Granada, Spain.

Robotic Spacecraft Blast Off On Russia-Europe Mission

Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission
Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission

If we found life on MARS red planet, so what would happen if we learned that there is microbial life on Mars, or that it has existed there in the past? Well it would only challenge everything we know. We would have to come to grips with not having a unique status in the universe and will have to work out how to include extraterrestrial “life” in our existential or religious beliefs – to name a few.

The first challenge if life is ever detected will be to prove that we didn’t bring it there from Earth – a difficult task to achieve. Careful cataloguing of the “bioburden” load on the spacecraft and from the cleanrooms it was assembled in can provide a check on what organisms might have been present on the spacecraft when it left the Earth. Fundamentally though, life that arose beyond the Earth would likely result from subtly different chemical processes, so to find out for sure, a detailed in situ biochemical analysis would be required.

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