Why is it that so many of our craft going to Mars have gone silent recently? (No, I'm not having a "tinfoil hat moment".) Interesting, Richard C. Hoagland (who has lots of tinfoil hat comments about Mars space missions) actually took off his tinfoil hat and said something on the Coast to Coast AM radio show last night that makes considerable sense: Beagle 2 was essentially a very cheaply-developed component of the Mars Express spacecraft that was essentially added to the spacecraft almost literally at the last moment of the design of Mars Express. Because it was so cheaply developed, they never had the time to test all the components of the landing system, and if any one part of the landing system failed the whole Beagle 2 lander would have crash-landed on the surface of Mars in a couple of thousand pieces. Now, if the two NASA landers that will land on Mars on 3 January 2004 and 24 January 2004 failed to function, that would be a very different story indeed.
Anyway, the most important part of Mars Express--the orbiter with its state-of-the-art sensors--is functioning correctly and is now undergoing a slow retrobraking process using its onboard manuevering thrusters to adjust its orbit from its currently highly-elliptical path and also move it to a near-polar orbit. That should be completed by the end of January 2004, in which time the sensors on Mars Express will its its high-resolution camera (including stereoscopic views), infrared camera, and imaging radar to carefully look at every detail of Mars' surface--especially looking for water.
Regarding Mars Express and the (admittedly very exciting) search for WATER up to 5 kilometers beneath the Martian surface, I've recently read what's at:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/express/mission/sc_science_marsis02.html I am a little concerned, though, that the search won't do a particularly good job of detecting the presence of ICE. Mars is COLD and liquid may not be that abundant nowadays. The abovementioned link only makes a rather passing reference to the quest to distinguish between rock and ice near the surface, though. I'm concerned about the potential for "false negatives" and the adverse impact they could have on fervor for Mars exploration. WashingtonPost.com suggests that ice and rock will be distinguishable by Mars Express, but again I see few (if any) details:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30844-2003Dec25.html QUOTE: "Mars Express can even probe beneath the surface of the planet using long wavelength radio waves from a 130-foot antenna to search for signs of subsurface water or ice."
In the mean time, I'm not particularly inclined to trust anything that Astrium says on its website. Look at all the promises made by Space Launch Initiative contractors in the USA, for example, even as the cost of launching humans into space from North America has gone nowhere but UP over time. Judging from your recent MARSIS analysis, it's increasingly seeming like ESA's contractors were more concerned with putting on a good show in hopes of securing greater funding for future projects. Doing a particularly good job seemed secondary, if not worth avoiding altogether. After all, the sting of defeat could prod the taxpayers into forking over more hard-earned Euros to recover from the international embarrassment.