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.
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