Europe and Russia attempting Mars landing

A joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) is expected to land a probe on Mars today October 19th, 2016. If successful, it will be the first successful landing on Mars that was not by NASA. Many attempts have been made by various countries and there have been a number of successful orbiters and flybys. For a full list of Mars missions see this Wikipedia page.

The mission named ExoMars includes an orbiter, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and a lander named Schiaparelli. Read more about it here.

You can watch the event live here. See here for more details on the broadcast schedule.

We used the details in this video to identify the landing area in Google Earth. You can use this KML file to view it in Google Earth. This is hand drawn based on the video and is not an official outline.

Schiaparelli’s landing zone as seen in Google Earth.

The landing zone includes the current location of NASA’s Opportunity rover.

[ Update: Also see this KML file with more detailed landing ellipses kindly provided by GEB reader Fernando Nogal. See this thread for more details. ]