No bark heard from Beagle 2 probe

All along Beagle's best hope has been Mars Express The British-built Mars probe Beagle 2 has failed to call Earth, dashing hopes that its mothership Mars Express would establish contact with the robot. Wednesday's attempt to reach Beagle was considered the last - and best - hope of locating the missing lander.

But the European orbiter picked up no signal as it passed over the presumed landing site at 1213 GMT, mission controllers in Germany have announced.

At a news conference held at 1500 GMT in Darmstadt, Germany, Professor David Southwood, head of science at Esa, gave journalists the sad announcement:

"We did not get any content of a signal or indeed a signal from the surface of Mars."

"This is not the end of the story, we have many more shots to play. But I have to say, this is a setback. I have to say it makes me very sad."

I think the the failure of the beagle is overshadowing the sucess of the mars express orbiter. Getting an orbiter to mars is no easy feat, just ask NASA about the 1999 polar orbiter and the mars climate orbiter in the early 1990's.

The mars express really has some whiz-bang instruments on it. It will map mars in 3D and it can focus in down to 2 meters resoloution, good enough to be able to identify objects the size of the rovers.

While sucess of the beagle lander would have been the icing on the cake, it was never intended to be the centerpiece of the mission. In fact the decision for mars express to carry the beagle at all was made realatively late in the development of the mission.

As an American space enthusiast who is extremely proud of our sucessful landing and hope for another sucessful one in a couple weeks. I will happily congratulate the european on getting their orbiter to mars and I can't wait to see the pictures and data from their mission.

I will NEVER gloat about a failure of the British doing anything! I consider them close friends of the US, and unless they do something really awful against us, I consider them Brothers. Same for the Australians.

Now, in general, I would say this about any scientific endevour of any country (unless there were some ulterior motives, like developing a new weapon to use against us or something).

I am really saddened by the Beagles loss. This was an ingenious little device, done on a shoestring budget. As another poster said, the orbiter part of the deal is going to be able to do some EXCELLENT science.

I was one of the few "hispanics" that I knew in school who rooted for the Brits during the Falklands war, and I took alot of grief for it. I will never turn my back on Britain, our best friend in the entire world (make that, worlds!)

This is disheartening news for the Beagle 2 team and the science community. It’s especially disappointing to scientists because Beagle 2 had instruments aboard that exceed the capability and sensitivity of those aboard Spirit and Opportunity useful in exploring for evidence of conditions that might have supported life on Mars.

The Beagle 2 update teleconference today was interesting. There will be other attempts to contact Beagle 2 over the next several days. Besides more radio contact attempts, another method will be photo-recon to search for the location of the rover and/or parachute on the surface using the high-res camera in the Mars Express orbiter. They also intend to use a Mars Express instrument to search for ammonia in the area of the landing zone because the air bags protecting Beagle 2 are filled with ammonia. I find it especially interesting that one step in the attempt will involve cooperation with the JPL MER team. The Beagle 2 team will ask JPL to command Spirit to transmit briefly on a frequency that Beagle 2 uses while a European radio telescope listens. That will confirm if it’s a viable search method for Beagle 2.

Based on original time-line and failure modes pre-programmed into Beagle 2, it appears all hope will be lost on or about February 7, 2004 if no contact has been made by then.

The Europeans will obviously carefully examine their re-entry and landing technology now. The finest rover instruments are worthless if they can’t land them in one piece. NASA discovered failure modes in the parachute and air bag systems during testing that were unexpected and would have led to catastrophic failure for the MER probes. NASA also made modifications to the lander retro rockets late in development to control horizontal velocity due to surface winds at Gusev crater that could have shredded the airbags on impact. I hope there is close cooperation between the European and USA teams in this area.

As others have mentioned, we can look forward to great science data from the Mars Express orbiter. I hope the Europeans will be motivated to attempt another rover mission sooner than currently planned in their exploration program scheduled for 2009. Mars is too fascinating of a place to slow down exploration now!

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