What is the importance of the Mars Express mission for the European space program?
The scientific mission — to see whether there is water and life on Mars — is of utmost importance . From a German point of view, there are some instruments on Mars Express and on the Beagle 2 that are significant. There’s the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which we expect will provide us with fantastic images and pictures that will help determine what the surface of Mars looks like. This will be correlated with measurements taken off the Martian surface and subsurface, to provide a highly accurate rendering of the planet. Meanwhile, the drill, or “Mole,” is a tool developed by the German Space Agency that we’re using to go underneath the surface. You can’t just draw Martian soil samples on the surface because of the influence the outer atmosphere and space have on the planet’s surface. We have to drill down almost 1.5 meters to see what the real soil looks like and, we hope, determine what it was like a million years ago. Was there life on Mars? Is or was there water? Does this missi
