PFS also measured the vertical pressure and temperature profile of carbon dioxide which makes up 95%

The Mars Express the first satellite car rent orlando to Mars of the European Space Agency was launched on June 2, 2003 from Baikonur on a Starsem built Soyuz/Fregat, having me celebrate the very early hours of my birthday (on June 3) with hundreds of likeminded people, a glass of good champagne in my hand, feeling like this must be the best birthday of my life as a satellite and lander en route to Mars is a gift not likely to be surpassed anytime soon.
On December 25, 2003, the national Dutch media convened at my home to witness the arrival of Mars Express in the wee hours of Christmas morning toasting 'to life on Mars' at the arrival with another glass of champagne. It is safe to say that Mars Express ingrained itself in my life willy-nilly.
Mars Express is so called because it was built more quickly than any other comparable planetary mission. Astrium in Toulouse, France, served as prime contracter leading a consortium of 24 companies from 15 European car rent orlando countries and the US.  The launch mass of Mars Express was 1120 kg (including 113 kg orbiter payload and 60 kg lander). The mission is coordinated from the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), Darmstadt, Germany, where my good friend Kees Veenenbos and some other colleagues gave me text updates on what was happening, while it was happening during the launch.
The mission was funded for one Martian year (687 Earth days), although the spacecraft was designed with a further Martian year s operation in mind. ESA ground car rent orlando station in New Norcia, near Perth, Australia.
The Mars Express Orbiter primary objectives are to image the entire surface of Mars in full colour at high resolution (10 metres/pixel) and image selected areas at super resolution (2 metres/pixel) with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). One of the camera s greatest strengths is be the pointing accuracy achieved by combining images at the two different resolutions. Another strength is the 3D imaging, which gives us the topography car rent orlando of Mars in full colour.  The 2-metre resolution image is nested in a 10-metre resolution car rent orlando swath which makes it easy to know precisely what was imaged. Gerhard Neukum is the principal investigator for the HRSC, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Mars Express produced a map of the mineral composition of the surface at 100 metre resolution with the OMEGA instrument (Visible and Infrared Mineralogical Mapping Spectrometer). OMEGA built up a map of surface composition in 100 metre squares. It determined mineral composition from the visible and infrared light reflected from the planet s surface in the wavelength range 0.5-5.2 microns. As light reflected from the surface must pass through the atmosphere before entering the instrument, OMEGA also measured car rent orlando aspects of the atmospheric composition.
OMEGA gave us insight in the iron content of the surface, the water content of the rocks and clay minerals and the abundance of non-silicate materials such as carbonates and nitrates.  Jean-Pierre Bibring is the principal investigator of OMEGA, Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, Orsay, France.
The Ultraviolet and Infrared Atmospheric Spectrometer SPICAM mapped the composition of the atmosphere and determined its global circulation. It does that from the wavelengths of light absorbed by the constituent gases. An ultraviolet (UV) sensor measuses ozone, which absorbs 250-nanometre light, and an infrared (IR) sensor measures water vapour, which absorbs 1.38 micron light. During the mission measurements of ozone and water vapour are made over the total surface of the planet and during the different seasons.
One instrument that gave us exciting news almost from the get go is the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS). The PFS while determining car rent orlando the composition of the Martian atmosphere from the wavelengths of sunlight (in the range 1.2-45 microns) absorbed by molecules in the atmosphere and from the infrared radiation they emit, found methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Methane points to recent activity on the planet as sunlight transforms methane into other chemicals over the course of only 3 centuries. After 250-300 years no methane would remain. Still, PFS found methane which meant that something on Mars was producing methane.
Should the headlines around Earth have read 'we are not alone!' , is a question hard to answer. Methane can be the product of the lifecycle car rent orlando of bacteria, car rent orlando or can be the byproduct of volcanic activity. Note: volcanic activity makes the likelihood car rent orlando of life on present day Mars also a lot higher as warmth and water (which melts when exposed to heat) gives a high chance of chemicals being absorbed by something and those somethings might be life bacteria.
When Vittorio Formisano announced his find in April 2004 the European Space Agency was appaled. They deemed his enthusiasm and announcement premature. However at the same time two teams, working independently of each other and independent of Mars Express detected methane in the Martian atmosphere using radio telescopes here in Earth. Later research by Formisano confirmed the amount of methane in the atmosphere and placed the hightest levels car rent orlando of detection exactly there where we know that Mars has an abundance of water in its soil. At those spots water vapour clouds were also detected. So perhaps we indeed are not alone?
What is certain that the detection of methane in the martian atmosphere gave rise to the need to design a Mars mission to corroborate this methane car rent orlando detection and possibly detect longer hydrocarbons and other complex organic molecules. Mars Science Lab Curiosity is send to detect hydrocarbons; perhaps we get our answer sooner than hoped?
PFS also measured the vertical pressure and temperature profile of carbon dioxide which makes up 95% of the martian car rent orlando atmosphere. PFS looked for minor constituents including water, carbon monoxide, methane and formaldehyde in that atmosphere.
The Energetic Neutral Atoms Analyser ASPERA is measuring ions, electrons and energetic neutral atoms in the outer atmosphere to reveal the numbers of oxygen and hydrogen atoms (the constituents of water) interacting with the solar wind and the regions of such interaction. Why did we want to measure this? The constant bombardment by a stream of charged particles pouring out from the Sun, is thought to be responsible for the loss of Mars atmosphere. The planet no longer has a global magnetic field to deflect the solar wind, which is consequently free to interact unhindered with atoms of atmospheric gas and sweep them out to space. Measuring how much plasma is escaping car rent orlando the planet gives us a chance to estimate how much atmosphere has been lost over billions of years.
The Mars Radio Science Experiment (MaRS) car rent orlando uses the radio signals that convey car rent orlando data and instructions between the spacecraft and Earth to probe the planet s ionosphere, atmosphere, surface and even the interior. We use the planet's gravity field to form an image of the interior of Mars. Changes in the velocity of the spacecraft relative to Earth are used to calculate the gravity of Mars. Roughness of the Martian surface is deduced from the way in which the radio waves are reflected from the Martian surface. Variations in the gravitational field of Mars cause slight changes in the speed of the spacecraft car rent orlando relative to the ground station, which can be measured with an accuracy of less than one tenth the speed of a snail at full pace
Personally I had high hopes that the MARSIS Sub-Surface Sounding Radar Altimeter would reveal underground liquid water reserves car rent orlando (underground lakes) of Mars. Knowing that liquid water + chemical heat = life made this instrument really exciting.  Regretfully it took over a year before the MARSIS 20 meter antennas on both sides of the satellite bus were deployed. This was due to the fact that the Mars Express team feared that deployment of the antenna by releasing the spring locks that kept the MARSIS antenna folded up against the main body of the satellite might cause the antenna car rent orlando to swing back and forth against the bus damaging the bus and perhaps the instruments inside the bus. MARSIS was only deployed after a full year of measurements by the other Mars Express instruments, in order to minimise the loss to science, if indeed a swinging MARSIS antenna would damage one of the instruments. In the end no damage was done by the deployment, however the computer model made of the deployment had predicted otherwise.
MARSIS was supposed to map the sub-surface structure of Mars to a depth of a few kilometres. The instrument s 40-metre long antenna (20 meter on each side of the satellite bus and 7 meters underneath the bus) send low frequency radio waves towards the planet, which are reflected from any surface they encounter. Mostly the radio waves will be reflected off  the surface of Mars, but a significant fraction will travel through the crust to be reflected at sub-surface interfaces between layers of different material, including water or ice.
However, the wait for results of MARSIS was even longer than one year, as MARSIS can only measure inside Mars when close enough overhead car rent orlando to Mars (and Mars Express has a very elliptical orbit), plus Mars must be experiencing night time at that side. This is because car rent orlando sunlight would warm up the atmosphere of Mars, thus making measuring by radio waves bouncing back to the Mars Express impossible. In the end MARSIS did find some underground lakes, but so far no one has proclaimed them to be filled with liquid water.
Part of the Mars Express mission was a small lander, Beagle 2, named after the ship in which Charles Darwin sailed when formulating his ideas about evolution. This lander was added onto the mission at a later date by Collin Pillinger of the University car rent orlando of Leicester, UK. However the mission car rent orlando being an add-on was only allowed a minimal weight. And having just 62 kgs of weight car rent orlando to play with makes it very hard to build a fully capable lander. Choices had to be made between science instruments and landing capabilities. In the end 4 airbags car rent orlando only (MER rov