It took a three-stage rocket and four burns of an upper stage to give the 4332-kilogram ExoMars spacecraft the oomph they needed to depart Earth for Mars. Jonathan McDowell helpfully summarized all the steps via Twitter. The Proton and Briz put the spacecraft into a circular, low-Earth orbit at 185 kilometers. A second Briz burn widened the orbit and made it elliptical, reaching an apogee of 5800 kilometers. The spacecraft looped back down toward Earth. Four hours after launch, a third burn increased the height of the apogee to 21,000 kilometers. The spacecraft climbed up to the top of that orbit and fell back toward Earth one last time before a fourth burn of the Briz finally gave it the speed it needed to escape Earth's gravity. McDowell estimates that ExoMars will pass the orbit of the Moon at 03:00 UTC tomorrow (20:00 PDT tonight).

The following is paraphrased from two very useful resources about ExoMars, the media kit (PDF) and this ESA blog entry by Daniel Scuka.

Getting to Mars

The journey to Mars will take seven months. Schiaparelli will separate from Trace Gas Orbiter on October 16, 2016 at 14:42 UTC. Because Schiaparelli is powered only by batteries, it will hibernate 15 minutes after separation. In order to target the lander at Mars, ExoMars will have been on a Martian collision course. Twelve hours after separating, ExoMars will perform a trajectory correction maneuver to target its Martian orbit insertion altitude instead of Mars.

On the date of Mars arrival, the one-way light time between Mars and Earth will be 9 minutes 46 seconds. The Mars orbit insertion burn will begin on October 19 at 13:09 UTC and will last about 134 minutes. Confirmation of a successful orbit entry will come from radio tracking of the spacecraft's changing velocity by ESA and NASA ground stations at 15:23 UTC. At the same time that it is entering orbit, the Trace Gas Orbiter will be recording signals from the descending Schiaparelli.

Schiaparelli will exit hibernation briefly six hours before hitting the atmosphere, and then wake up for good at entry minus 75 minutes. Schiaparelli will hit the atmospheric entry interface on October 19 at 14:42 UTC at an altitude of 122.5 kilometers and a speed of 5.8 kilometers per second. It will use a heat shield, parachute, rockets, and finally a crushable impact structure to slow its descent to the surface. Mission controllers on Earth will not have live telemetry during the descent, because the landing is a very risky moment and the whole point is to record data about the landing process, even if (especially if) it is unsuccessful. In order to have "bent-pipe" relay as Curiosity had through Odyssey for live telemetry updates during landing, the orbiter has to decode the lander's transmissions before sending them to Earth. This is fine if everything goes well, but if something goes awry, information can be lost if the orbiter fails to decode the lander's signal.

Instead, Mars Express will record Schiaparelli's transmissions in "open loop" mode, not attempting to decode them. That way, it will have a record of whatever is transmitted, even if the transmissions are wildly out of expected frequencies due to the final dynamics of some catastrophic event. After the landing is complete (regardless of the outcome) Mars Express will package the recording and send the whole thing to Earth, where it will be decoded and interpreted. Earth will receive this recording about an hour after landing. Trace Gas Orbiter will record in the same way but will keep a longer recording, and its data will arrive on Earth later than Mars Express'. Meanwhile, the 45-meter dish of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope near Pune, India, will record Schiaparelli's faint signal as it descends; ESA may receive confirmation of Schiaparelli's landing through this method first.