DARMSTADT, GERMANY/HESSEN GERMANY – Scientists were waiting for word Wednesday on whether the European Space Agency's experimental Schiaparelli probe had safely touched down on Mars. Signals received from the lander indicated that it entered the atmosphere of the red planet as planned and deployed its parachute. Schiaparelli is meant to test technology for a future European rover and avoid the fate of Europe's ill-starred Beagle 2 robot, which failed to function after landing on Mars 13 years ago. The probe is part of a larger mission called ExoMars that will help in the hunt for life on the planet. Schiaparelli was released from the mother ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter, on Sunday.

New supersharp photos of Mars show Europe's long-lost Beagle 2 lander, ancient Red Planet lake beds and snaking rover tracks in unprecedented detail. Scientists "stacked and matched" photos captured over the years by NASA's eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using new machine-vision methods, creating images in which features just 2 inches wide can be seen. This resolution is five times greater than MRO or any other instrument orbiting Earth or Mars had been able to achieve, researchers said. Further use of this technique could help space agencies select safe landing sites for future Mars missions, search for pieces of other lost Red Planet hardware and perform a variety of other science work, they added. "We now have the equivalent of drone-eye vision anywhere on the surface of Mars where there are enough clear repeat pictures," study co-author Jan-Peter Muller, of University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said in a statement.

The idea of enhancing an image digitally to reveal previously unseen levels of detail has become something of a sci-fi movie cliché. Now, astronomers at University College London have used a similar computer vision technique to learn more about the location of the missing Beagle 2 probe on the surface of Mars. A paper on the novel "stacking and matching" technique, which allows researchers to pick out objects at a resolution of up to five times greater than the original images, was published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in February. But just recently, the UCL researchers began using the technique, called Super-Resolution Restoration (SRR), to identify individual objects on the red planet's surface. "We now have the equivalent of drone-eye vision anywhere on the surface of Mars where there are enough clear repeat pictures," Jan-Peter Muller of UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory says in a press release.