European Mars Spacecraft Captures First Images Of Red Planet

The ExoMars mission, a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has captured the photos of the red planet from afar after glimpsing it for the first time. The mission's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) reportedly took the image of Mars from a distance of 41 million kilometers away on June 13. Incidentally, the distance was near enough to capture certain dark and light patches on the planet.

The #ExoMars @ESA_TGO captured its first image of #Mars earlier this week! https://t.co/uYMjMMv1nj pic.twitter.com/MOqJN9k6NX

— @ESA_ExoMars (@ESA_ExoMars) June 16, 2016

The first batch of images by ExoMars is just the start, and the photos captured by TGO confirm that the instruments aboard it are focusing and working as planned. Once the TGO gets nearer to Mars, the pictures sent back by the mission will be of a quality that will be far superior to those provided by Earth based telescopes. However, such feats can only be possible after the second week of October, owing to the positioning and proximity of the ExoMars mission to the red planet, as it is scheduled to enter the Martian orbit on Oct 19.

"The images have confirmed the sensitivity of the instrument and are sharp," said Antoine Pommerol, from the University of Bern. "It seems to be well-focused and the signal level seems to be close to prediction."

The ExoMars mission is geared towards looking for gas sources on the Martian surface, such as those produced by volcanoes, as well as rare gas like methane. It has been a tough task for scientists to classify the methane sources on Mars, and Earth based telescopes have noticed a variety of measurements. In fact, even NASA's Curiosity rover that is at present on the red planet detected a methane spike for a few weeks in 2013 and 2014, and later it was found that the occurrence was not related to seasonal change. The presence of methane is a good indicator of geological and biological activity, in particularly that of microbes as far as the latter is concerned, as per reports.