Talk:Mars Express

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why is the italian space agency pointed out here ? Italy is part of the ESA and all the space agencys from ESA's member countries took part in the programm, right ? e.g. CNES, DLR, ...

i have corrected information about "why it is called express" according to reality and information from ESA--Kyknos 19:27, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This article doesn't seem to make it clear that that the Mars Express was an unmanned or robotic mission. It would be natural to assume that everyone already understands this, but one can imagine a naive person reading of the loss of contact with the lander and feeling very sad about the poor explorers stranded on the red planet.

[edit] Merge?

I'm suggesting a merge of the Mars Express Orbiter into the Mars Express page. Some reasons:

1. Lots of the same information is in both (for instance, both include a list of instruments).
2. Launch information and timelines could really be combined as they apply to the same spacecraft.
3. The Mars Express page currently like just a portal to get to the Beagle 2 and Mars Express Orbiter pages.

Why should Mars Express be the destination?

1. Since the loss of Beagle 2, when someone says "Mars Express", they really mean "Mars Express Orbiter". I.e. if they look the orbiter up (like I did), they probably just search for "Mars Express".
2. The Beagle 2 page could have a short description and link there with a "Main Page" template.

This is just a suggestion, any comments?--will 02:20, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Additionally, no where besides Wikipedia is the orbiter (of "Mars Express Orbiter") capitalized. I don't believe that it's the true name of the spacecraft or the mission. It was really "the orbiter of Mars Express". Beagle is, of course, a different story. With no major objections I'll try to merge these sometime soon if no one beats me to it. --Koeppen 01:04, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the two should be merged. Alternately, if there is enough information about the overarching mission, perhaps the 'Mars Express' page could be renamed to 'Mars Express mission', with links to the 'Beagle2' and 'Mars Express Orbiter' pages. Then all mission objective, contributers, etc. could be on the 'mission' page, and the specific spacecraft information could be moved to the orbiter page. The launch information and timelines would then fit on the 'mission' page.

Blumunky 03:54, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I support merging the two; I searched for Mars Express to see what had become of the mission since I last read of it, and came away thinking Wikipedia had almost no content on the topic -- before I spotted that ~-Orbiter contained all the useful information! Chris Smowton 09:54, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I have a friend who is part of the Mars Express team in Darmstadt and whenever he e-mails with news he refers to it as "Mars Express" or more recently MEX (a redirect I created as I've also seen it referred to in published papers).

Mars Express is actually the mission under which all the research and instrumentation control is carried out. The orbiter is just one part of this (obviously the fundamental part) but is just the instrument that is used to conduct the mission. If there is enough info the orbiter does justify it's own page but the main article should be Mars Express the mission with the orbiter details linked from there. An easy way to think of it is something like the Deep Sky Survey (looks like I'd better create that one - can't believe it's not there!) that these days primarily uses the Hubble Space Telescope to gather it's data. The mission and the instrument are separate but intimately linked things. The confusion arises here because the instrument was built for the mission and is currently used for nothing else.

I suspect this grew up historically as originally the only part of the mission that was active was the orbiter construction and control team. The rest had to wait until the orbiter was launched and had passed it commissioning tests. Sophia 11:21, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I just remover inter-wiki from Mars Express Orbiter it was linking to pl:Mars Express Orbiter and ru:Марс-экспресс so not logical. Looks like merging Mars Express Orbiter and Mars Express is necessary because it is the only siccessful part and beagle 2 is only crash —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Rdfr (talk • contribs) 15:06, 7 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] New image necessary

Hey, it looks like the main image for this article will be "deleted soon without warning". We need to find one that's public domain....--Koeppen 01:30, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Good luck. Most ESA images are like that, including every image either released through press or the PDS (which is about as rare as an albino unicorn). Either all those images are deleted, or the policy changes. That fact that this things has been orbiting Mars for 2 and a half years, and only one image has been put in the article really tells me that not all is as it should be. But on the other hand, the Mars Global Surveyor has been around for a decade, and there are only 4 images for it. Anyways, back to MEX. If you can go to the PDS site and process the images they have put in there, that will quite probably be public domain, as far as I can tell (Derivative work?). Press images are sometimes ugly, and always garish anyway, so it would be an improvement over the lone propaganda image anyway.--Planetary 10:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Note about the link to ASI in the page: the MARSIS instrument is not an EDI (ESA Developed Instrument) but has been provided by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) which developed it using national fundings, in cooperation with JPL. Being it a direct contributor to the mission, I think the link is justified. FlyerAlpha 22:44, 6 February 2007 (UTC)