Italian Space Agency President Roberto Battiston holds a pamphlet reading in Italian 'Colonize Mars, Friday, Oct. 19, 2016, in front of a rendering showing the Schiaparelli Space Module and the planet... (Associated Press) 
 
 BERLIN (AP) — Europe's experimental Mars probe hit the right spot — but at the wrong speed — likely ending up in a fiery ball of rocket fuel when it struck the surface at high speed, scientists said Friday. 
 
 Pictures taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a black spot in the area where the Schiaparelli lander was meant to touch down Wednesday, the European Space Agency said. The images end two days of speculation following the probe's unexpected radio silence 50 seconds before the planned landing. 
 
 Schiaparelli was meant to test technology for a more ambitious European Mars landing in 2020, and scientists say the data it sent back before going silent will prove highly useful for that mission. ESA also stressed that Schiaparelli's mother ship was successfully placed into orbit Wednesday and will begin analyzing the Martian atmosphere in search for evidence of life. 
 
 Still, the crash-landing is a painful reminder of how hard it is to put a spacecraft on the surface of the red planet. Europe's Beagle 2 probe reached the surface in 2003 but failed to deploy properly. Only NASA has repeatedly succeeded in landing several robotic vehicles on Mars, including the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers. 
 
 ESA said that, according to what its scientists have been able to piece together so far, Schiaparelli suffered problems during the last 50 seconds of its descent through the harsh Martian atmosphere. 
 
 Instead of achieving a soft landing it probably plummeted the last 2-4 kilometers (1.4-2.4 miles) onto the surface, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 kilometers (186 miles) per hour. 
 
 The pictures taken by NASA suggest that the probe's thrusters — which were meant to slow its final descent — failed, causing it to hit the surface with almost fully loaded tanks of rocket fuel and explode on impact. 
 
 While Schiaparelli was able to beam back some 600 megabytes of data before the crash, scientists won't get any of the close-up photos the probe took during its descent. Those were meant to be transmitted after the landing. 
 
 ___ 
 
 ExoMars mission: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/ExoMars ||||| Image copyright ESA Image caption Artwork: Landing on Mars is not easy and requires rapid deceleration 
 
 Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday. 
 
 Telemetry recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early. 
 
 The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time. 
 
 The European Space Agency has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Schiaparelli's landing sequence - stage by stage 
 
 Landing on Mars is always a daunting prospect. 
 
 It is necessarily a high-speed approach that has to be got just right or the spacecraft runs the risk of smashing into the ground. 
 
 Schiaparelli had a heatshield, a parachute and rocket thrusters in order to slow its approach to the surface. 
 
 If the robot is later confirmed as lost, it will clearly be a major blow to Esa which suffered the disappointment of the Beagle-2 lander's failure at Mars in 2003. 
 
 But officials here have underlined the fact that Schiaparelli was always viewed within the agency as a technology demonstrator - a project to give Europe the learning experience and the confidence to go ahead and land a more ambitious six-wheeled rover on Mars in 2021. 
 
 Mars - a tale of joy and failure 
 
 There have been about 15 attempts to get down to the surface of Mars, and they are split fairly evenly between success and failure. 
 
 The US space agency has been the most successful with seven successful landings on the Red Planet. 
 
 The Soviet Mars 3 probe landed softly but only transmitted data for 15 seconds. 
 
 The European Space Agency's last attempt to land on Mars was in 2003, with Beagle 2. But it never sent a signal from the surface. 
 
 "This is typical for a test," said Prof Jan Woerner, Esa's director general. "We did this in order to get data on how to land on Mars with European technology. Therefore, all the data we will get this night will be used to understand how to manage the next landing when we go with the rover." 
 
 This future vehicle is expected to use some of the same technology as Schiaparelli, including its doppler radar to sense the distance to the surface on descent, and its guidance, navigation and control algorithms. 
 
 What will concern commentators is that the budget for the rover is not yet secure. If Schiaparelli is indeed lost, Esa officials may find themselves having to work harder to explain to member states why the extra investment remains worthwhile. 
 
 Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos ||||| Image copyright NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Image caption The dark patch and white spot magnified on the right are likely the impact site and parachute 
 
 The gouge in the ground probably made by Europe's Schiaparelli probe as it hit the surface of Mars on Wednesday has been imaged by a US satellite. 
 
 The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has identified a large dark patch in the robot's targeted landing zone consistent with a high-velocity impact. 
 
 Schiaparelli is widely thought to have crashed and been destroyed. 
 
 Data transmitted from the probe before it lost contact indicated that its descent systems did not work properly. 
 
 Its parachute was jettisoned too early and its retrorockets, designed to slow the robot to a hover just above the surface, fired only for a few seconds. They should have operated for half a minute. 
 
 The MRO imagery is not quite definitive because the resolution is low - just six metres per pixel. Its context is persuasive, however. 
 
 The roughly 15m by 40m dark patch, which is probably dust and rock fragments thrown out from the impact, is sited some 5.5km west of Schiaparelli's expected touchdown point in the equatorial Meridiani Plain. 
 
 Tellingly, the feature is not present in previous MRO pictures of the location. 
 
 The clincher, though, may be the artefact 1km to the south of the patch. This white blob looks to be Schiaparelli's 15m-wide parachute which would have floated down behind the probe. Again, this was not present in earlier pictures. 
 
 Image copyright ESA Image caption Artwork: Things started to go wrong at the end of the descent's parachute phase 
 
 The European Space Agency (Esa) and MRO's operator, the US space agency (Nasa), are confident the features described do indeed represent the scene of Schiaparelli's contact with the surface. 
 
 Engineers continue to analyse the telemetry the probe transmitted through the various phases of its descent before dropping radio contact unexpectedly about 50 seconds before the anticipated touchdown time. 
 
 They want to establish precisely why the parachute and rocket thrusters behaved the way they did. In due course, they hope also to be able to identify the height above the surface that each event occurred. 
 
 Ultimately, the investigation should tell us at what stage in the descent sequence Schiaparelli went into freefall - somewhere between two and four km up - and the speed with which it smacked into the ground. This is estimated to be greater than 300km/h. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Schiaparelli's landing sequence - stage by stage 
 
 Further photographic insights will come from MRO next week when it flies back over the scene with its high-resolution (HiRISE) camera. 
 
 Generally, this can distinguish objects on the ground a mere 30cm to 60cm across, and can achieve even better when special processing techniques are employed. 
 
 Schiaparelli was part of Esa's ExoMars programme - a joint venture with the Russians - which is endeavouring to search for evidence of past or present life on the Red Planet. 
 
 The 600kg robot was conceived as a technology demonstrator - a project to give Europe the learning experience and the confidence to go ahead with the landing on Mars in 2021 of an ambitious six-wheeled rover. 
 
 This future vehicle will use some of the same technology as Schiaparelli, including its doppler radar to sense the speed and distance to the surface on descent, and its guidance, navigation and control algorithms. 
 
 Esa director-general, Jan Woerner, said the fact that Schiaparelli returned 80% of its anticipated descent telemetry makes it a success, irrespective of what happened in its last seconds. 
 
 "[The 80%] means we will obtain information from a close analysis of the data that Schiaparelli was built for, notably on the performance of elements such as the heat shield, parachute, radar, thrusters and so on," he wrote on his blog. 
 
 "This information can subsequently be used to improve the design of the [2021] Exomars mission, since in that mission the survival of the descent module will be of real scientific relevance." 
 
 Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
– We now have the most definitive sign yet—courtesy of a NASA orbiter—that the European Space Agency's Mars lander crashed onto the planet's surface in what the AP describes as a "fiery ball of rocket fuel." ESA lost contact with the Schiaparelli lander Wednesday, approximately 50 seconds before it was supposed to land on Mars. What exactly happened to the lander has been a mystery, but a crash seemed likely. Now, images from a NASA orbiter released Friday show an approximately 6,500-square-foot dark patch on the Martian surface a few miles from where the lander was supposed to touch down, the BBC reports. That spot is likely the result of an exploding lander. ESA reports the lander's parachute deployed then released as planned (it's probably the small light spot in the new image). But the lander's nine thrusters fired for only a few seconds instead of half a minute for some reason. The lander probably free-fell for up to 2.5 miles before hitting Mars at more than 185mph. And since the thrusters didn't use much of the stored rocket fuel, a decent-sized explosion was probably the result. NASA plans to get a better picture of the crash site next week. The lander was meant to be testing technology for another ESA landing in 2020. Its failure means NASA is still the only agency to successfully land a robotic vehicle on Mars, having done so several times.