rationalskepticism.org

“We have lots of power to continue operating, assuming it’s on the surface, so we’ll continue like that for a certain period, but there will be a moment where we have to decide if we intervene,” said Don McCoy, ESA’s ExoMars project manager. “There are a few possibilities, (but) not so many. The machine was not really designed to have been an interactive machine. It was a test, and the test is complete now.”

Before its arrival at Mars, Schiaparelli received pre-programmed commands from mission control to run through its surface mission without any help from Earth. The battery-powered lander, hosting a weather station, descent imager and a multitude of engineering sensors, was expected to function for at least four days on the surface, and perhaps as long as 10 to 12 days, McCoy said.

“This lander was a test, and as we are always doing when we are doing tests, we put many sensors on-board,” said Jan Woerner, ESA’s director general.

[snip]

“Given the amount of data that we will have acquired through Schiaparelli yesterday, and given that the whole point of Schiaparelli was to acquire practical experience, the data feeds directly into the 2020 mission,” Parker said. “All the key pieces of hardware were activated and provided data or functioned as expected, so the experience feeds into the next mission exactly as planned.”

But ESA will have to present their case at a meeting of the agency’s member states in December when officials ask European governments for around $330 million (300 million euros) to make up for a shortfall in funding for the construction of the ExoMars 2020 rover.