Mars Express

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Mars Express unlocks the secrets of curious cloud

When spring arrives in southern Mars, a cloud of water ice emerges near the 20-kilometre-tall Arsia Mons volcano, rapidly stretching out for many hundreds of kilometres before fading away in mere hours. A detailed long-term study now reveals the secrets of this elongated cloud, using exciting...
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In November, ESA’s Mars Express will perform a series of five tests in which it will attempt to receive data from Zhurong and relay it to ESA’s ESOC Operations Centre in Darmstadt.

This is also a chance for the Mars Express team to test a backup method for communicating with Mars landers, designed over a decade ago but never before tested live in orbit.
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Mars Express keeps an ear out for Chinese rover – Mars Express

ESA's mission to the Red Planet
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Further to the above.

This November, ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft carried out a series of experimental communication tests with the Chinese (CNSA) Zhurong Mars rover. Mars Express successfully caught data sent up ‘in the blind’ by the rover and relayed them to Earth where they were forwarded to the Zhurong team in China.
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A one-way phone call at Mars

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The MARSIS instrument on Mars Express was originally designed to study the internal structure of Mars. As a result, it was designed for use at the typical distance between the spacecraft and the planet’s surface – more than 250 km.
But it recently received a major software upgrade that allows it to be used at much closer distances and which could help to shed light on the mysterious origin of the moon Phobos.
“During this flyby, we used MARSIS to study Phobos from as close as 83 km,” says Andrea Cicchetti from the MARSIS team at INAF. “Getting closer allows us to study its structure in more detail and identify important features we would never have been able to see from further away. In future, we are confident we could use MARSIS from closer than 40 km. The orbit of Mars Express has been fine-tuned to get us as close to Phobos as possible during a handful of flybys between 2023 and 2025, which will give us great opportunities to try.”
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A close encounter with a mysterious moon

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Cryptic Mars, a land shaped by ice

ESA’s Mars Express has captured an astonishing array of landforms emerging from a thick winter blanket of frost as spring arrives in the south polar region of Mars. Some of these features are surprisingly dark compared with their icy surroundings, earning their nickname of ‘cryptic terrain’.
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Mars Express carried the British Beagle 2 lander that was supposed to have looked for life but sadly never made contact with Earth, they eventually found out that some of the solar panels did not open right. Though it is surprising that Mars Express has lasted this long despite the fact that it never had RTGs supplying power having solar panels instead.
 

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