June 2nd - on this day in 2003, a Starsem Soyuz FG/Fregat rocket launched ESA - European Space Agency's first planetary mission, Mars Express, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The 1,123 kg spacecraft also included the 33 kg Beagle 2 lander. Mars Express's orbital insertion around the red planet occurred on Christmas Day, 2003, with Beagle 2 landing the same day. Contact with Beagle 2 could not be established, so it was assumed the lander crashed. In 2015, however, high-resolution phot

Mars Express • Fly Across Mars’s ‘Labyrinth of Night’ 11.10.23 • Nestled between the colossal martian ‘Grand Canyon’ (Valles Marineris) and the tallest volcanoes in the Solar System (the Tharsis region) lies Noctis Labyrinthus – a vast system of deep and steep valleys that stretches out for around 1190 km (roughly the length of Italy here on Earth). This video visualises a flight over the eastern part of Noctis Labyrinthus as seen by Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). It presen