A six-wheeled robot weighing as much as two people slammed into the atmosphere of Mars yesterday morning at 19 200kph, opened a parachute, fired rockets, inflated its airbags and bounced safely to a halt on the floor of a meteor crater.
It sent a procession of confirmatory beeps back to Earth from its radio beacon as it made its six-minute descent, and then began to transmit pictures of the Martian landscape — and bits of itself — to anxious scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena in California.
Knuckles had whitened at every stage of the mission. Nasa, shaken by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts last February, urgently needed a success.
But in the past 40 years more than half of all missions to Mars have failed. During a 10-week period in 1999 all four Nasa probes perished as they reached the planet.
”I said it would be six minutes of hell and in this case we said the right prayers and got to heaven,” said Ed Weiler, a Nasa science chief. ”It’s an incredibly difficult place to land. Some have called it the death planet for good reason.”
Sean O’Keefe, Nasa’s administrator, said: ”This is a big night for Nasa — we are back!”
The US mission team went wild. ”I have never seen such celebratory scenes in a Nasa control room since the Apollo days,” said Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist who has been trying to find his probe Beagle 2, missing since it began its descent to Mars on Christmas Day. ”In recent times they’ve been very conservative with their celebrations, a bit of polite applause — but they are really going to town.”
The British mission controllers still hope to hear from Beagle when its mothership, Mars Express, makes its first pass low overhead on Wednesday. Professor Pillinger congratulated the Americans, and admitted to a twinge of envy. ”Anybody when they see the other side celebrating is believing this could be us. We haven’t given up yet. If we find Beagle on Wednesday we will show you what celebration really is.”
The £50-million Beagle — an oversized wok packed with sophisticated instruments, including a tiny mole to dig beneath the subsoil and a miniature oven for ”cooking” geological samples — should have reached Isidis Planitia, a large basin north of the Martian equator, early on Christmas morning. Controllers repeatedly used the US spacecraft Mars Odyssey, already in orbit, to try to make contact, and radiotelescopes at Jodrell Bank in Britain and in the Netherlands and California, have tried to pick up the faintest signal from the probe.
On Sunday the European Space Agency’s Mars Express began to settle into a steady polar orbit around the red planet. This remains the researchers’ best hope of contact.
Beagle 2 was the only mission designed to probe for chemical signatures of bygone life on Mars. Spirit, the Mars exploration rover which arrived on Sunday, is designed to operate for up to 90 days, examining geology to build up a picture of the planet’s watery past.
Spirit is equipped with a stereoscopic camera set at roughly the height of human eyes, and a set of geological tools to chip at or drill into rock in the planet’s Gusev crater, a 144km wide dent that formed more than 3-billion years ago when an asteroid crashed just south of the Martian equator.
Gusev is marked by channels which may once have drained water or ice into the crater. Liquid water is a prerequisite for life — and although Mars is now cold and arid, with a tenuous atmosphere, it may once have been warm and awash with lakes, rivers and even seas. After a week of scientific checks and engineering tests, Spirit will move off its landing pad to start looking for hard evidence of ancient seas — salts, gypsum and other telltale sediments.
This probe is the first of two identical robots in an $820m exploration of Mars. The second, Opportunity, is due to touch down on January 25 in a region called Meridiani, which is apparently rich in haematite, a mineral that on Earth is linked to water.
The data from three satellites now orbiting Mars, and the results of the rover missions, together with any data from the Beagle, would give scientists new insight into Martian history as well as a deeper understanding of Earth.
While US scientists exulted, the British researchers went back to trying to contact their truant probe. ”I’d like to add my congratulations to the Spirit team,” said Mark Sims, of the University of Leicester. ”It’s a fantastic achievement. I hope they go on to do fantastic science on Mars.” – Guardian Unlimited Â