ESA welcomes new friend at Mars

ESOC Control Room

"Congratulations to our NASA colleagues on a hugely successful landing,” said Paolo Ferri, ESA’s Head of Solar and Planetary Mission Operations. “The Mars Express team welcomes a new friend in the neighbourhood."

Mars Express picked up MSL signals about 10 minutes before it entered the atmosphere, travelling at 21 000 km/h, for its critical descent and landing phase.
 
“We tracked MSL for about 28 minutes then lost contact as expected just a few moments before Curiosity’s touchdown in Gale Crater,” said Michel Denis, Mars Express Spacecraft Operations Manager.

“NASA now have this valuable data and everyone here is delighted to have helped support Curiosity’s arrival at Mars.”

The signal recordings made by Mars Express and New Norcia station include information on MSL’s velocity and direction. They record the sequential critical events during descent, including parachute deployment, heat shield separation and rover separation.

They will prove valuable to scientists as they reconstruct MSL’s descent profile, helping to improve and refine models of the martian atmosphere and assess landing accuracy.

The signals recorded by Mars Express will be automatically downloaded two more times later today via New Norcia and ESA’s Cebreros station, in Spain, to ensure redundancy.