Mars Orbit Mission Stalls
A third attempt to confirm the survival of the European Mars lander Beagle 2 failed on Friday when a NASA spacecraft swept over the planned touch down site on the Red Planet without picking up a signal.
The tiny Beagle, designed to search for signs of life on Mars, was to have landed shortly before 0300 GMT Thursday. It was supposed to open its solar panels and call home within a few hours.
"There is no signal from Beagle 2 detected by Mars Odyssey passing over this evening," Peter Barrett, spokesman for the government's physics and astronomy research agency said Friday after the NASA craft made its latest pass.
Mars Odyssey, which has been in orbit since 2001, had the first shot at communicating early on Thursday, but picked up nothing. The vast Lovell radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, also failed to detect Beagle's call sign, despite scanning the Martian surface late Thursday.
The agency said scientists at Jodrell Bank were listening again Friday from 1815 GMT until 2400 GMT, when Mars will be visible to the radio telescope, which recently was fitted with a highly sensitive receiver.
"It is also hoped that the Stanford University radio telescope in California will be able to listen" on Saturday, the agency said.
There was no immediate comment from the European scientists Friday evening, but as the hours tick past with only silence from the surface of Mars, they insisted it was too early to lose heart.
"We are not in any way giving up yet," chief Beagle scientist Colin Pillinger said Friday morning before the third failure. "We will hang on testing and waiting and checking with Beagle 2 until Mars Express is able to look for us and that won't happen until Jan. 4," he added.
The Mars Express mother ship, which carried Beagle into space and set it loose a week ago, went into orbit around Mars on Thursday, and is designed to beam back data gathered by Beagle. It also is to map the Martian surface and search for water with powerful radar that can scan several kilometers (miles) underground.
In the coming days, controllers must change the orbit of Mars Express from a high elliptical one around the equator to a lower polar orbit that will let it establish contact with Beagle.
Professor Pillinger said the mother ship could offer the best hope of reaching Beagle as, unlike Odyssey and the Jodrell telescope, its communications were specifically designed to hear the probe's transmissions.
"Those contacts are already programmed in, so we have got the on board computer and would be silly to waste them or in any way, shape or form give up until we have used them," he added.
Pillinger said both the Mars Odyssey link and communications using Jodrell Bank were untested.
He said there were 13 more chances for Odyssey to pick up a Beagle signal.
After that the lander will go into an auto transmit mode, sending out a continuous on-off pulse throughout the Martian daylight hours to anyone able to receive it, the agency said.
More contact attempts will be made using radio telescopes in different parts of the world.
Concerns about the fate of the Beagle have not dimmed the success of the success of the Mars Express orbit.
European Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin called it a "fantastic achievement," whether scientists get any transmissions from the Beagle 2 craft or not.
"Even if not all parts of the mission have succeeded, we must still acknowledge its significance, and build upon the experience gained to ensure higher chances of success in the future," the European Union official said in Brussels.
"The Mars Express project is a good illustration of what Europe can achieve, on this planet and beyond, if it works together," he said in a statement.