The Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Schiaparelli lander — the first phase of the two-part, European-led ExoMars life-hunting program — phoned home Monday on schedule at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT), 12 hours after blasting off together from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The rocket is scheduled to reach Mars on the 19th of October this year.
TGO's two solar arrays deployed shortly after radio contact was established, European Space Agency (ESA) officials announced via Twitter.
"We have a mission, and for the second time, Europe is going to Mars!" ExoMars flight operations director Michel Denis said from ESA's control center in Darmstadt, Germany, just after TGO's signal was received. "Go, go, go, ExoMars!" he said.
One of the scientists who worked on the project included Dr Manish Patel who hails from Bakrol, Gujarat and is the co-lead for the NOMAD instrument, and a Senior Lecturer in Planetary Sciences at the Open University and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. He and his team designed and led the TGO’s ozone mapping ultraviolet (UV) spectrometer instrument and watched the launch via a live link from the European Space Operations Centre (Esoc) in Darmstadt, Germany.
Dr Patel said: "It was a bit of a numbing few minutes before the launch but I'm very happy, although it's not over yet. I won't be celebrating till we get final separation and the signal from the spacecraft telling us it's on its way."
He continued: "The instrument on board ExoMars is really a beta version of Beagle. I have spent the last 13 years of my life working on it so I am excited and nervous. You're strapping an instrument you've devoted your life to on top of a great big bomb.
"I don't think we will see biological organisms there now but I think we may see life that existed, maybe billions of years ago which has gone extinct. I think within five to 10 years we will know whether there was life on Mars."
Dr Patel previously worked on a weather instrument for the ill-fated Beagle 2 lander which was part of ESA’s first Mars mission ‘Mars Express’ and was launched in June 2003. Beagle 2 was scheduled to land on the surface of Mars on 25 December but Dr Patel was heartbroken when no contact was received at the expected time of landing on Mars, with the ESA declaring the mission lost in February 2004, after numerous attempts to contact the spacecraft were made.
