ExoMars Sees Mars

When you spend a lot of time and effort to send a spacecraft to another planet, it's a nice benchmark when that spacecraft first spots it. The image above is Mars, as seen by the Trace Gas Orbiter, part of the European Space Agency's two-pronged ExoMars program (the first mission is the TGO plus Schiaparelli, a lander that will test technologies for future missions, including the 2020 ExoMars rover). TGO and Schiaparelli were launched on March 14 and were about 41 million kilometers from its des...