The alluring prospect of life on Mars

If you happened to be standing today on the reddish sand of Meridiani Planum – a vast, flat, expanse just south of the Martian equator – you might well spot a dark spec in the distance against the peach-coloured sky, moving towards you. In the next few hours, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli probe will make its final, six-minute decent through the Martian atmosphere. If it succeeds in touching down safely, the probe will be one of the very few to make it to the Martian surface. But after a journey of 500 million kilometres, it’s only then that the probe’s work will really start: scientists hope the Schiaparelli lander will act as a Martian weather station, sending data all the way back to earth in preparation for a future, more ambitious probe.

The Schiaparelli won’t be alone on the surface of Mars: fourteen probes – some wrecked – litter the Martian landscape.