Computer glitch blamed for European Mars lander crash

A tiny lander that crashed on Mars last month flew into the Red Planet at 540 kilometers per hour instead of gently gliding to a stop, after a computer misjudged its altitude, scientists said.

Schiaparelli was on a test- run for a future rover meant to seek out evidence of life, past or present, but it fell silent seconds before its touchdown on October 19.

After trawling through mountains of data, the European Space Agency ( ESA) said Wednesday that while much of the mission went according to plan, a computer that measured the rotation of the lander hit a maximum reading, knocking other calculations off track. That led the navigation system to think the lander was much lower than it was, causing its parachute and brak- ing thrusters to be deployed prematurely.

“The erroneous information generated an estimated altitude that was negative – that is, below ground level,” the ESA said in a statement.

“This in turn successively triggered a premature release of the parachute and the backshell ( heat shield), a brief firing of the braking thrusters and finally activation of the on- ground systems as if Schiaparelli had already landed. In reality, the vehicle was still at an altitude of around 3.7 kilometers.”

The 230 million euro ($ 287 million) Schiaparelli had travelled for seven years and 496 million kilometers onboard the Trace Gas Orbiter to within 1 million kilometers of Mars when it set off on its own mission to reach the surface.

After a scorching, supersonic dash through Mars’s thin atmosphere, it was supposed to glide gently towards the planet’s surface. For a safe landing, Schiaparelli had to slow down from a speed of 21,000 kilometers per hour to zero, and survive temperatures of more than 1,500 C.

It was equipped with a heat- protective shell, a parachute and nine thrusters to decelerate, and a crushable structure in its belly to cushion the final impact.