ESA plans to build on the legacy of British Mars lander Beagle 2 by placing the Schiaparelli module on the Red Planet in October. A new image shows the desert plane on Mars where ESA will land the Schiaparelli module on 19 October this year. This will be the first European landing attempt on the red planet since 2003’s ill-fated Beagle 2.

• Known as Meridiani Planum, this area of Mars is relatively flat which makes it as safe as possible for the landing attempt. Nasa’s Opportunity rover landed here in 2004.
• The region has been well studied from orbit and shows good evidence of once having been covered in water. There are clay sediments and sulphates that were likely formed in the presence of water, and a number of water-carved channels.
• Launched on 14 March 2016, it will enter Martian orbit in October and begin a comprehensive study of the planet’s atmosphere that will last until at least 2022.
• In recent decades Nasa has been cautious about its search for life on Mars. It has chosen to concentrate on looking for the evidence of past and present water on Mars, in an attempt to assess the planet’s habitability. ESA’s Exo Mars programme is bolder. It will actively search for evidence of life.
• A key investigation for the Trace Gas Orbiter is to search for the origin of methane in the martian atmosphere. On Earth more than 90% of methane is produced by living organisms. The rest comes from geological processes.
• Images from an orbiting spacecraft returned in 2014 showed that Beagle 2 landed safely but a final solar panel, which covered the radio receiver, failed to deploy and so the lander could not communicate with Earth.