Europe and Russia jointly launched ExoMars 2016

On 14 March 2016, Europe and Russia launched an unmanned spacecraft named ExoMars 2016, to smell Mars atmosphere for gassy evidence that life once existed on the Red Planet, or may still be. ExoMars 2016, the first of a two-phase Mars exploration, was hoisted from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Russian Proton rocket. With its suite of high-tech instruments, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) shall arrive at the Red Planet on 19 October 2016 after completing a seven month long journey of 496 million kilometers through space. A key goal of the mission is to analyse methane, a gas which on Earth is created in large part by living microbes, and traces of which were observed by previous Mars mission.

What is ExoMars?

                The ExoMars programme is a joint endeavour between European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. The primary goal of the ExoMars programme is to address the question of whether life has ever existed on Mars. This relates to its name, with the ‘exo’ referring to the study of exobiology – the possible existence of life beyond Earth (sometimes also referred to as astrobiology).