General

...or why I think that ESA's mars mission is superior to the NASA mission that is going on at the same time.



Both ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautic and Space Administration) decided to do their own missions to mars at about the same time. ESA decided to send one orbiter and one lander to mars, NASA decided to play safe and sent out not one but two landers, Spirit and Opportunity. And of course, they have their own orbiter, too. ESA was first, but their lander failed for so far unknown reasons (we will know as soon as people settle on mars . Fortunately, this didn't hurt the mission too much, since the lander including a rover was only a "gimmick" that was intended to retrieve only a small fraction of all the scientific data.



NASA reached mars a few days later, and their first lander, Spirit, landed successfully. What Spirit did so far was shooting a few pictures, and rolling out of the actual lander. It is also intended to get some stone probes, to analyze it and to send the results back to earth. Opportunity is designed to do the same things, but it landed on the other side of mars, 10000 km away from Spirit.



But when you look at the actual scientific data produced by both the ESA and the NASA mission, you will see that NASA definitely does the better PR work. But what have they produced so far? A few snapshots and panorama pictures (which are nice, but well...), and some stone probes. But due to their design, they can't drill down further than maybe a few meters (if even that deep). That's all nice and useful (especially the stone probes for the geologists), but IMHO, it's not really something special: we've seen pictures from mars before, and we've analyzed probes from mars before.



So, I'm a lot more impressed by the work done by ESA: although they lost their lander (what a pity...), they concentrated not so much on the PR (no "the best crew in the world!" cheering) but more on actual science, and

• produced detailled 3D maps of parts of mars which has never done before, and where the big geological structures can be analyzed better than ever before.
• proved the existence of water on the south pole of mars. NASA asserted that they had detected that in 2001 already, but in fact, they didn't, because they didn't have the right equipment. All they were able to detect at that time was hydrogen, which is a possible indicator for water, but definitely not a prove. IMHO, proving that water exists on mars is the biggest scientific leap in the history of mars exploration, as it solves the problem of water and fuel supply, which are the big show-stoppers for a possible manned mars mission.
• measured the actual temperature on the mars surface (up to +4 degrees Celsius), which is higher than estimated before.
• is about to create extremely detailled satellite pictures of the mars surface (with a resolution of 1x1 meter per pixel).

These are all really interesting scientific that NASA wasn't able to provide so far. So, thanks to ESA for doing such a valuable work.



For more information on both mars missions, check out the ESA portal and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which both provide extensive information on their respective missions.