Global Mars: Celebrating 20 Years of Europe's Mars Express Orbiter

Global Mars: Celebrating 20 Years of Europe's Mars Express Orbiter

To mark 20 years of Europe’s Mars Express mission, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) team produced a new global color mosaic revealing the planet’s surface color and composition in spectacular detail.

This graphic highlights the Mars Express mission’s most impressive numbers to date, from the 1.1 billion km travelled over 24 000+ Mars orbits to the 170+ PhD students trained and 1800+ scientific papers published using Mars Express data.

Two decades ago, on June 2, 2003, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter launched and began its journey to the Red Planet—Europe’s first ever mission to Mars. The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in December 2003. It used its vantage point to study the martian atmosphere and climate, unravel the planet’s structure, mineralogy and geology, and search for traces of water across its surface. The mission carried a state-of-the-art package of eight instruments to achieve this, enabling it to probe surface, subsurface, atmosphere and more.

Mars Express has now been in space for two decades, despite a planned initial lifetime of just 687 Earth days. It has achieved its aforementioned aims and revealed a wealth of knowledge about Mars in that time, making it undeniably one of the most successful missions ever sent to the Red Planet.

The orbiter will continue its study of Mars until at least the end of 2026, with an indicative extension from January 1, 2027 to December 31, 2028 to support the JAXA-led Mars Moons eXploration (MMX) mission (Japan), followed by two years of post-operations.

Mars Express has conducted data relay for seven rovers and landing platforms (more information), and enabled scientific collaboration with a further five orbiters.

The past 20 years of observations from Mars Express have solidified our picture of Mars as a once-habitable planet, with warmer and wetter epochs that may have been oases for ancient life. This is a monumental shift from our previous view of the planet, which characterized it as an eternally cold and arid world.

Mars Express has identified and mapped signs of past water across Mars—from minerals that only form in the presence of water to water-carved valleys, groundwater systems, and ponds lurking below ground—and traced its influence and prevalence through martian history. It has peered deep into the martian atmosphere, mapping how gases (water, ozone, methane) are distributed and escape to space, and watching as dust is whipped up from the surface into the air. The mission has seen giant dust storms engulf the planet, creating familiar clouds like those we see on Earth, and tracked rare ultraviolet auroras. 

The orbiter has seen signs of recent and episodic volcanism and tectonics, and explored the planet’s unique surface features, mapping 98.8% of Mars and creating thousands of 3D images of impact craters, canyons (including the Valles Marineris system), the planet’s icy poles, immense volcanoes and more.

This is a simulated view of Mars from a vantage point 2,500 km above the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system, with enhanced color and contrast (at this relatively low altitude, the planet’s polar caps are not visible). It is a composite of red, green and blue filter mosaics with the color band values stretched individually, and has a spatial resolution of 2 km per pixel (although higher resolution data products are possible and already in the works).

Darker grey-toned areas of Mars represent grey-black basaltic sands of volcanic origin; lighter patches show clay and sulphate minerals; and the large scar across the planet's face is Valles Marineris.

Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/G. Michael, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Release Date: May 23-June 6, 2023

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