Roscosmos Exomars Spacecraft are working excellent, with the orbiter sending the photos of starry view taken en route to the Red Planet. Mission operators and scientists are following liftoff on 14th March. This is to check the Trace Gas Orboter (TGO) and Schiparelli entry and also landing demonstrator to ensure they will be ready for Mars by October.

TGO will embark a mission to measure the abundance and distribution of rare gases in atmosphere with all sophisticated sensors. With particular interest is methane which can active geological and biological processes on Planet.

“All systems have been activated and checked out, including power, communications, startrackers, guidance and navigation, all payloads and Schiaparelli, while the flight control team have become more comfortable operating this new and sophisticated spacecraft,” says Peter Schmitz, ESA’s Spacecraft Operations Manager.

View will show the random selected portion of sky close to Southern celestial pole. Two frames are taken from slightly different directions using camera rotation mechanism. Number of equally positive and negative images of stars are taken by subtracting one frame from other.

“TGO and Schiaparelli instruments are all working well, and the science teams that operate them will continue calibration and configuration checks while en route to Mars to ensure they are ready for the exciting mission that lies ahead,” says Håkan Svedhem, ESA’s ExoMars 2016 project scientist.

In the beginning a technology demonstrator will conduct a number of environmental studies while the short mission on surface of Mars. For an idea, it will make measurements of electric fields which combine measurements of concentration of atmospheric dust to provide new insights.

“The initial switch-on went quite smoothly and so far things look good. Although it was not designed to look at faint stars, these first images are very reassuring. Everything points to us being able to get good data at Mars.” says Nicolas Thomas from the University of Bern in Switzerland, and camera principal investigator.