What Went Wrong with the Schiaparelli Mars landing

Posted on by Steve Hurley

Revised and Updated March 2026

As many space enthusiasts who can remember back to October 2016 will recall, after the long journey from Earth (with its mothership the ExoMars TGO) ESA’s Schiaparelli probe descended through the atmosphere but failed to land successfully . The plan was that when it entered the Martian atmosphere, the spacecraft would immediately begin to slow down to 1700 km/h as a result of the friction caused by the atmosphere hitting its heat-shield.  When it reached this speed, and was 11 km above the Martian surface, a parachute would open for two minutes to slow it down to 240 km/h. The parachute would then be jettisoned to get it out of the way, allowing thrusters to fire like the reverse-thrust brakes on a jet aircraft .  The spacecraft would then touch down on the planet’s surface at a gentle 10 km/h.

The failure of the Schiaparelli spacecraft to land on Mars

Adapted from  ESA image

Unfortunately, what happened was that the parachute only opened for a few seconds and failed to slow the spacecraft down and so it crashed into the surface at thousands of km/h and was destroyed on impact. It was disappointing for the European Space Agency(ESA), especially since their previous attempt to land on Mars (Beagle 2) back in 2003 ended in failure. However Schiaparelli had only a small suite of instruments and was only designed to last for about a week on the Martian surface. The main spacecraft of the mission, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), is still, ten years later, in orbit around the planet studying the way methane and other trace gases are distributed in the Martian atmosphere.

This is described in my post:

The ExoMARS TGO tracking methane on Mars

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Published by Steve Hurley

Hi I am Steve Hurley. Although I work in the IT industry. I studied for a PhD in astronomy in the 1980s. My real passion is explaining scientific concepts to a non-scientific audience. My blog (explainingscience.org) covers various scientific topics, but primarily astronomy. It is written in a style that it is easily understandable to the non scientist. Publications and videos For links to my books and videos please visit www.explainingscience.org

17 thoughts on “What Went Wrong with the Schiaparelli Mars landing”

  3. Oh, this is a disappointment! I was hoping we’d get some exciting news to distract us from this horrible election mess going on right now. Plus I was having so many nice daydreams about either going to Mars to escape Donald Trump or sending Trump there himself.

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    1. Very true.
      When I saw the news of what had happened I felt really sorry for the all the scientists, engineers and technicians on the project who had invested so much time and effort on it.

      The Science Geek

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  8. I hadn’t caught up with the news for a couple of days but figured something had gone badly wrong. ESA seems not to have much luck getting a soft landing on Mars – the Beagle, now Schiaparelli – though it’s an extremely tricky thing to do at the best of times. But there’ll be some good science from the orbiter, which is the primary mission.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yes, very true. Landing n Mars was always going to be tricky and to date roughly 50 per cent of previous attempts have failed. The major part of the mission is the orbiter, which hopefully will produce some interesting results. Were it to confirm that the methane is likely to be organic in origin that would be an amazing result.

      Liked by 1 person

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