This is the second time that ESA has tried to land on the red planet … and without success: in 2003 the Beagle 2 lander of the Mars Express suffered the same fate. On this occasion, errors in the Schiaparelli software when analyzing the data that came from its sensors could make the probe “believe” it was much closer to the ground of Mars than the real one, turning off the engines when in it was actually 2 to 4 kilometers above the surface.
Mars has been a jinx planet for space exploration : more than half of the Soviet missions and a third of the North American ones have ended in disaster. The Russians in particular, of 16 Mars-bound space missions, only one, Mars 5 (launched on July 25, 1973), can be considered a success. Loss of communication, failure of the lander, landing in the middle of a sandstorm … Everything has happened to the poor Russians.
With the launch of the Phobos probes in July 1988, everyone hoped that they would be able to remove the Martian thorn. There was no way: a mission control operator sent the wrong order to Phobos I and it got lost on the way, and Phobos II disappeared after taking 40 pictures of that Martian moon. After the disaster, it took 8 years for them to try again with Mars 96, which ended up falling into the Pacific between the Chilean coasts and Easter Island.
NASA has not been safe from Martian jinx either. The most striking was that of the Mars Observer, which was lost on August 20, 1993 after receiving the order to fill the fuel tanks and start braking. And there are things that only happen to the Marx brothers, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen … and NASA. As an example, we have the disaster of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 that disintegrated in the upper atmosphere of the red planet because NASA made a mess with the units of measurement: the software used the Anglo-Saxon measurement system and the spacecraft expected the data in the Metric system.
