On Wednesday, July 28, 2021, within the framework of the joint Russian-European project EXOMARS 2016 after a series of test runs, the first full-fledged session of the TRACE GAS ORBITER spacecraft (RUS. – “The orbital apparatus for the study of small atmospheric components”) with funds of the Russian Commission of Reception of Scientific Information and Reserve Management (RCPII).
Despite the fact that at present, the TGO spacecraft is in orbit around Mars almost as much as possible from the ground (388 million kilometers), all the tasks of the control session were successfully completed by the RCA.
EXOMARS project – a joint project of the state corporation “Roscosmos” and the European Space Agency, which is implemented in two stages. The first mission was bred into space in 2016. It included two spacecraft: Trace Gas Orbiter for observations of the atmosphere and the surface of the planet Since the spring of 2018 is located on the working orbit near Mars and the second – the Skiapareli landing module for the development of landing technologies, its mission ended abnormally.
The scientific tasks of the TRACE GAS ORBITER mission – the registration of small components of the Martian atmosphere, including methane, mapping the prevalence of water in the upper layer of soil with a high spatial resolution of about tens of kilometers, surface stereo. The device installed two devices created in Russia: ACS spectrometric complex (ACS – Atmospheric Chemistry Suit, a complex for studying the atmosphere chemistry) and a neutron high-resolution telescope FREND (Frend, Fine-Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector).
The second stage of the project, the launch of which is scheduled in 2022, provides for delivery to the surface of Mars of the Russian landing platform “Cossack” with the European automatic rosalyde “Rosalind Franklin” on board. The launch will be performed using the Proton-M media missile and the Breeze-M accelerated block from the Baikonur cosmodrome.