Hope began to fade on Friday that the European space probe Beagle 2 had landed safely on Mars after the British-built craft failed for a second time to make contact with Earth and confirm its arrival.
Scientists had hoped that the Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in west England would pick up a signal between 10pm GMT on Thursday and 00.30am GMT on Friday to tell them the missing spacecraft had arrived safely on the Red Planet.
But the Beagle 2, which had already failed to signal its arrival to Nasa’s Mars Odyssey orbiter earlier on Christmas Day, once again remained silent and the fate of the probe remains unknown.
”Jodrell Bank listened out for Beagle 2 tonight, but did not detect a transmission,” said a statement from project spokesperson Peter Barratt in London.
Nasa’s orbiter will fly over the probe’s scheduled landing site again at 6.15pm GMT on Friday hoping to detect the expected message — a nine-note tune composed by the British pop group Blur.
Despite the setback, the Beagle 2‘s mothership, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) orbiter Mars Express, was placed successfully in orbit around Mars at about the same time as the lander was to have touched down at 2.54am GMT on Thursday.
In London, experts in the Beagle 2 team have insisted that the silence does not mean the game is over and that there remains a good chance that the miniaturised lab survived its descent.
”I’m afraid it’s a bit disappointing but it’s not the end of the world,” the project’s leader, Colin Pillinger, an ebullient professor of planetary science, told the media on Thursday after the first disappointment.
”Please don’t go away from here believing we’ve lost the spacecraft … We’ve just gone into extra time. There’s a long way to go.”
At the mission’s control room in Darmstadt, Germany, ESA science director David Southwood said: ”It’s not the end of the story … we are sure Beagle is on the surface, we just need to hear from him.”
Although Beagle 2 is one of the most spectacular parts of the mission, it represents only about 10% of the total scientific work aboard the Mars Express, ESA scientists said.
Other instruments aboard the Mars Express will enable researchers to obtain ”very interesting images, with a global coverage of the planet, which does not exist at present”, said Augustin Chicarro, the scientific director for the mission.
The instruments include a stereoscopic camera, a means of observing gravity anomalies, a radar capable of seeing beneath the surface and spectrometers to examine minerals and the atmosphere for any evidence of life.
The 33kg British-built Beagle 2 detached from Mars Express last Friday and started a gliding descent towards the planet surface to begin its mission to search for signs of life.
Packed with revolutionary instruments, the disc-shaped probe had been due to touch down at Isidis Planitia, a large, flat plain near the Martian equator that may once have been awash with water.
The landing — by far the trickiest challenge in Beagle‘s 400-million kilometre trek — began with re-entry 120km above Mars when Beagle was to meet the first molecules of the planet’s mainly carbon-dioxide atmosphere at 20 000kph.
The last phase was the inflation of airbags that were to swathe the lander like protective beachballs.
After that, the lander had to open up and let its solar panels open out like petals, getting light from the distant Sun to recharge its batteries.
Francis Rocard, with France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), suggested Beagle‘s antenna could be out of alignment because the probe had finished its course on a large stone and thus was lying at an angle.
”That means Mars Odyssey would have been below its radio horizon and could not have picked up the signal. In theory, there should not be the same problem with the next flyby on Friday,” he said on Thursday.
Pillinger added it was possible there was a software incompatibility between Beagle and Mars Odyssey, for there had been no time to test this link exhaustively.
The worst-case scenario was catastrophic failure but nobody was contemplating this yet, he said.
Mars Express will need until January 4, after completing a series of final orbital manoeuvres, before it can be in position to receive any signal from Beagle 2, if the probe is in fact alive and well. — Sapa-AFP