The ExoMars Spacecraft Approaches the Red Planet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
How sad.
The reason they give is as follows:
Schiaparelli is primarily designed as an entry, descent and landing technology demonstrator, and therefore does not carry solar panels or radioisotope thermal generators to supply power over an extended period. It is only intended to survive on the surface for a few days powered by batteries.
http://m.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/ExoMars/ExoMar...
Well, if they're not even going to try to take pictures from the surface, I guess it doesn't make much sense to bother with solar panels or an RTG...
https://www.quora.com/How-does-ESA-plan-to-power-its-future-...
http://www.space.com/692-esa-chief-europe-space-nuclear-powe...
[1] http://www.space.com/32890-nuclear-fuel-spacecraft-productio...
Europe can produce P238 if it wanted too, it has one of the highest nuclear material production capabilities globally.
In fact, the link you give explicitly mentions safety and political risks in addition to availability.
> not only are there sourcing issues with Pu-238 (reserves are running low and production is not high enough), there are safety concerns and political issues related with its use in RTGs.
Furthermore, it's not an accident they don't have any Pu-238. The lack of it is deeply connected to the general fear of doing anything radioactive, and hence no effort to develop production capability.
It's clear ESA is being forced to consider nuclear power sources simply because it's almost impossible to fulfill certain missions without them. But the fact that they are willing to consider it when absolutely necessary does not mean they haven't seriously scaled down mission potential in the past by using solar power.
The Russians have never had good luck with Mars all their probes failed or crashed.
This one isn't a classical probe this is effectively as identical to the rover lander just without the rover as they could get, with a few experiments stuck to it since there was room and they were going there any how.
A good analogy would be if NASA would have sent a skycrane probe that would lower a curiosity rover sized weight onto the surface of mars to make sure that it works.
Since the final lander itself won't have a power source or unfolding solar panels there is no point of adding them to this demonstrator since you are increasing the complexity of the system which is counter productive to the goals of the mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM_lander
"It was built in Italy"
Philae didn't use an RTG because it was a tiny 21KG spacecraft and RTGs are heavy and big.
When the RTG is bigger than you spacecraft you can't really use it ;) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/New_Hori...
That said in general RTGs are not that common, they are really only used when solar is completely out of the question.
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/16/exomars-lan...
Obviously anything about Mars is interesting, but this picture has a peculiar property. Look at the picture and imagine that the light is coming from the upper right -- when you do that, the crater becomes a dome. If instead you imagine that the light is coming from the lower left, it becomes a crater again.
I've seen this in other ambiguous terrain photographs, but this picture easily supports the ambiguity.
There are countless other illusions we could talk about too, none of which seem all that peculiar to me, even if they were to be observed on another plant.
Mission design dictates whether solar power is enough to satisfy your requirements. For Curiosity, they wanted to go faster and longer with more power than solar would have given them considering the size of the rover (i.e. not much space to put solar panels on, which yields in lower power available).