Europe’s Mars lander probably crashed because of a problem with its navigation system

The European Space Agency is still trying to figure out why its ExoMars Schiaparelli lander crashed on the surface of Mars last month, and it’s looking like it has something to do with bad data that the vehicle gathered during its descent. In an update today, the agency said that information collected by one of the lander’s instruments made the vehicle think it was below ground level — while it was still falling. This triggered a chain of events that threw part of Schiaparelli&