It is really sad that the European Space Agency (ESA) lost their Schiaparelli lander last year, as we will miss out on a lot of Mars science. From a software engineering and testing perspective, the story of why the landing failed rather instructive, though. It gets down to how software can be written and tested to deal with unexpected inputs in unexpected circumstances. I wrote a piece about this on my blog at the Intel Developer Zone. Update: read the 2022 take on Schiaparelli loss on this blog. The Intel blog post has been retired.