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NASA Images Reveal Where the ExoMars Mission Probably Crashed

The latest robotic victim of the Red Planet.

Pour one out for the robotic Schiaparelli lander tonight, the latest victim on Mars, that cruel planet we want so badly to put humans on but which refuses, at least for the moment, to let one more lander or rover set wheels on its scorched red surface.

After a tense few days of "Where's our robot?," the fate of European Space Association's ExoMars Schiaparelli lander is all but certain: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught photos of what's suspected to be its crash site.

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Schiaparelli malfunctioned about 50 seconds before its planned Wednesday touchdown, firing its retrorockets for a few seconds and ditching its parachutes and back shield, because who needs those.

Based on this new MRO data, our hero started falling from between two and a half to one mile above the surface, hitting the dirt at more than 186 miles per hour. The 49-by-131 foot burnt hole where a lander should be is a little over three miles west of Schiaparelli's intended landing spot. "It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full," ESA said in its release. Awesome.

ESA and the ExoMars team refuse to take the L on this one. They're beginning the work of extracting descent signal data from the lander's mothership, the Trace Gas Orbiter, to find out what went wrong, and then moving on to its primary mission of studying the Martian atmosphere and preparing for its role as a telecommunications relay station for the ExoMars 2020 rover.

Screw you too, Mars. We're not done here.

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