[meteorite-list] Beagle 2 Mars Lander's Remains May Have Been Spotted on Red Planet

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/12/beagle-2-mars-lander-remains-red-planet?CMP=share_btn_tw

Beagle 2 Mars lander's remains may have been spotted on red planet

Press conference on Friday will provide an update on the fate of the Mars 
spacecraft that disappeared on Christmas day in 2003

Ian Sample
The Guardian
January 12, 2015

A British Mars lander that was lost on its way to the red planet more 
than a decade ago may have been spotted by an orbiting spacecraft.

The Beagle 2 lander was supposed to touch down on Christmas day in 2003, 
but after it was released from its mothership, Mars Express, the dustbin-lid-sized 
craft was never heard from again.

But Beagle 2's final resting place may finally have been discovered. Scientists 
operating the HiRise camera on Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) 
will take part in a press conference this Friday to announce "an update" 
on the ill-fated mission.

The HiRise camera is the only camera in Mars orbit that can image the 
surface in high enough detail to spot missing spacecraft. The HiRise team 
has already found the twin Viking landers which touched down on Mars in 
the 1970s and photographed Nasa's Phoenix, Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. 
They have been actively hunting for Beagle 2 for several years.

"HiRise is the only camera at Mars that can see former spacecraft like 
Beagle 2. It's definitely pretty close to its intended landing spot, no 
matter what. It entered the atmosphere at the right time and place," said 
Shane Byrne, a scientist on the HiRise team at the University of Arizona. 
He said the team has been asked to keep more details of the announcement 
under wraps.

Built on a shoestring budget, Beagle 2 was meant to announce its arrival 
on Mars by playing a musical call sign written by the Britpop band Blur. 
But despite astronomers listening for the lander's signature tune with 
some of the most sophisticated receivers on Earth, all they heard was 
silence.

Led by the late planetary scientist, Colin Pillinger at the Open University, 
Beagle 2 was designed to look for signs of life on Mars and carried a 
drilling instrument to poke beneath the surface. Its release from the 
European Space Agency's orbiter, Mars Express, went smoothly, placing 
Beagle 2 on course for a landing site at Isidis Planitia, a huge plain 
near the Martian equator.

The lander was meant to deploy a parachute on its way down to the Martian 
surface and inflate triple air bags at the last minute to cushion the 
impact. When the spacecraft failed to call home, many space scientists 
suspected it had broken up on impact.

The UK Space Agency sparked rumours that remnants of the lander had been 
found when it scheduled a press conference on Friday 16 January to announce 
an update on the Beagle 2 lander.

"The spacecraft was successfully released on 19th December 2003, and was 
due to land on Mars on 25th December 2003. Nothing has been heard from 
Beagle 2 since," the notice said.

Mark Sims, professor of astrobiology and space instrumentation at Leicester 
University, who led a internal inquiry into why Beagle 2 failed to call 
home, declined to comment on whether the lander had been found.

But another space scientist who spoke to the Guardian, who asked not to 
be named, said that the remains of the lost lander might have been spotted 
with the HiRise camera. With a new image-processing technique that overlays 
multiple images, the camera can pick out features as small as 5cm across 
on the Martian surface.

Pictures of the lost lander would be of huge interest to space scientists 
who are planning future missions to Mars, such as the European Space Agency's 
Exomars mission, which is due to launch in 2018 and land the year after. 
"Whatever happens with space missions, there are always lessons to be 
learned for future missions. Anything about Beagle 2 would be useful in 
terms of narrowing down exactly what did go wrong," the space scientist 
said.

John Bridges at Leicester University, a member of the HiRISE camera team, 
will be at the press conference, along with David Parker the chief executive 
of the UK Space Agency.

The Beagle 2 lander, which looked like two dustbin lids fused together, 
was 95cm in diameter. If the lander hit hard, the wreckage could be strewn 
over a much larger area. Beagle 2's parachute and airbags should be easier 
to spot if they deployed properly and were not blown away by Martian dust 
storms. These could lead back to the lander itself.

Ian Crawford, a panetary scientist at Birkbeck, University of London, 
said that even though finding Beagle 2 would not have much scientific 
value, knowing its fate was still important. "People would like to know 
what happened to it. Knowing where it crashed, if it did crash, could 
be useful for people trying to work out what went wrong. If it landed 
more or less where it was supposed to land, then that at least gives you 
some confidence that the entry worked."

Researchers in charge of the HiRise camera at the University of Arizona 
have taken repeated high-resolution images of the part of Isidis basin 
where Beagle 2 was due to land.

"We always realise in practice that we could have done things differently 
or better. And when things go wrong, if we can determine why it went wrong, 
then that's invaluable," said John Zarnecki, a planetary scientist at 
Open University.