The Schiaparelli lander hit the ground of the Red Planet as part of the European-Russian ExoMars 2016 mission on Wednesday, the ESA (European Space Agency) said.

The lander entered the atmosphere of Mars at the level of about 122.5 km going at the speed of approximately 21,000 km/h. The parachute broke out at the altitude of about 11 km, at the speed about 1,650 km/h.

Vladimir Nazarov, chief of the ground scientific complexes department at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, confirmed that the unit had landed on Mars.

The first stage of the ExoMars 2016 mission includes an orbital module and a showpiece lander created by the ESA. The orbital module KA TGO (Trace Gas Orbiter) is designed to study trace gases in the atmosphere and the distribution of water ice in the soil on Mars. The Russian research institute created two devices for the TGO: the Atmospheric Chemistry Suit (ACS) spectrometry system and the Fine-Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND). The TGO will start its scientific mission in late 2017, after a year of complex maneuvers of breaking down and transition to a circular orbit. It will be later used as to relay the signals broadcast from the rover, the Mars research vehicle, to be included in the next mission, the ExoMars 2020.

The ExoMars 2016 Russian-European mission began on March 14, 2016, when a Proton-M carrier rocket with a spacecraft including a TGO orbital module and a showpiece lander Schiaparelli lander blasted off from Baikonur.