Investigations are continuing into exactly what happened and at what stage of the flight. ESA has emphasized the experimental nature of the lander, and the benefits of the data already collected. The detailed monitoring of the descent was a lesson learned from the loss of the UK’s Beagle 2 lander in 2003, whose fate was unknown until 2015. All of the data transmitted by Schiaparelli, also known as the entry, descent and landing demonstrator module (EDM), during descent has been recovered, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may add some more information about its fate, although MRO has not been in contact with the lander.

Andrea Accomazzo, ESA’s head of solar and planetary missions said: “The EDM entered the atmosphere of Mars and most important of all we have collected all the engineering information from this phase. This we have successfully done with the Trace Gas Orbiter.

“We have data from all the hardware of the EDM. This is fundamental for a test. We can also see the hardware has provided meaningful data. Now we need to analyse why, when we put together this data in the martian environment, the spacecraft did not behave exactly as we expected. It will take more time to have a global picture of the descent.”

Don McCoy, ExoMars project manager, said that the AMELIA (Atmospheric Mars Entry and Landing Investigation and Analysis) instrument team believed most of their data were collected. AMELIA co-principal investigator Stephen Lewis tweeted that 600MB of Schiaparelli data had been received and that 99% of the test was complete.