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 touchdown 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 3am GMT on 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, spokesperson for the government’s physics and astronomy research agency, said on 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 on Thursday.
The British agency said scientists at Jodrell Bank were listening again on Friday from 6.15 GMT until midnight GMT, when Mars will be visible to the radio telescope, which recently was fitted with a highly sensitive receiver. However, no signal was detected.
The Stanford University radio telescope in California might also be able to listen on Saturday, the agency said.
There was no immediate comment from the European Space Agency scientists on Friday evening. But they had faced the first two failures with confidence and optimism, insisting it was too early to lose heart.
“It’s like sending somebody a love letter, and you know they got it and you’re waiting for a response,” Professor Colin Pillinger, chief Beagle scientist, said at a news conference earlier in the day.
“We are not in any way giving up yet,” he said, “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 January 4,” he added.
The Mars Express mother ship, which carried Beagle into space and set it loose a week ago, could offer the best chance to get a signal from Beagle.
The mother ship, which went into orbit around Mars on Thursday, is designed to beam back data gathered by Beagle. In the coming days, controllers must change its orbit from a high elliptical one around the equator to a lower polar orbit that will let it establish contact with Beagle.
Unlike Odyssey and the Jodrell telescope, its communications were specifically designed to hear the probe’s transmissions, Pillinger said.
“Those contacts are already programmed in, so we have got the onboard 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.
The British agency said Beagle 2 was targeted at a large lowland basin called Isidis Planitia. Its “pocket watch” design should have allowed it to turn upright irrespective of which way up it fell, the agency said.
The onboard computer was supposed to send commands to release a clamp, open the lid and begin transmission. Four, petal-like solar panels were to initiate charging of the batteries.
Possible explanations for Beagle‘s failure to call home include an off-course landing in an area where communication with Mars Odyssey was difficult, if not impossible. Or transmission from the lander’s antenna could be blocked from reaching Mars Odyssey or the ground-based telescopes, the agency said.
Concerns about the fate of the Beagle have not dimmed 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. — Sapa-AP
On the net:
Mars Express: www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars-Express/index.html
Beagle 2: www.beagle2.com