Nasa announces Juno craft circling gas giant had to shut down camera and instruments, while ESA says Schiaparelli lander may have crashed on red planet

Bad day for space probes: one lost on Mars, another in 'safe mode' at Jupiter

Nasa’s Juno space probe orbiting Jupiter went into “safe mode” with cameras and instruments offline just as it prepared to pass over the immense planet’s dense cloud tops, the space agency said. The disc-shaped 577-kg (1,272 lb) Schiaparelli lander, which will test technologies for a rover due to follow in 2020, is expected to enter Mars's atmosphere at a speed of nearly 21,000 km (13,049 miles) per hour at 1442 GMT. A European lander that descended to Mars on Wednesday has failed to send signs of life to its mothership, leaving scientists uncertain whether it touched down on the Red Planet gently as planned, or crashed and broke apart, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. At the time it was dubbed “a heroic failure.”

Landing on Mars, Earth’s neighbor some 35 million miles (56 million km) away, is a notoriously difficult task that has bedeviled most Russian efforts and given NASA trouble as well. The primary part of the current Russian-European ExoMars mission, bringing the Schiaparelli lander's mothership into orbit around Mars to search for signs of life, was meanwhile a success. The spacecraft on which the Schiaparelli lander traveled to Mars, Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), carries an atmospheric probe to study trace gases such as methane around the planet.
The European Space Agency fails to contact its Schiaparelli lander during its descent through the atmosphere of the planet Mars.