EUROPEAN space scientists meeting in London last week hatched a plan for the
European Space Agency to bring a 200-gram sample of Martian soil back to Earth
by around 2010. If the project goes ahead, ESA will get to take a close look for
evidence of microbial life on Mars before NASA does.
The proposed mission would be a successor to ESA’s Mars Express project,
which is due to blast off in 2003 carrying the British-built Beagle 2 lander.
“My nightmare scenario is that Beagle 2 gets a sniff of a positive result and we
have no plans in place for a follow-up mission,” Colin Pillinger, head of the
Beagle 2 team, told the BBC last week.
Last week’s meeting, held at the Royal Society in London, attracted the
attention of academic and industrial leaders not normally associated with space
research. Britain’s science minister, Lord Sainsbury, sent a letter of support.
“We didn’t expect there to be such a broad interest and determination in the
project at this early stage,” Pillinger told 91av.
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Beagle 2 is due to be the next spacecraft on Mars. The “mole” device it will
use to gather soil samples for chemical analysis is being considered as a
prototype for the proposed mission to bring back a sample. The mole can crawl
and burrow for samples and is attached to a winch that will reel it back in to
the lander. “We are going to be looking at the mole on Beagle 2 more closely
than ever now,” Pillinger says.
Once the new lander has scooped up its sample, it could carry out an initial
analysis there and then. This would let scientists judge whether the sample has
been contaminated on its return to Earth. It might also help determine whether
Martian meteorites found on Earth have been contaminated.
Within a couple of years, ESA will have sent off all its planned missions to
targets in the Solar System. NASA has no confirmed plans to send missions to
Mars other than an orbiter in 2005. So researchers are planning to put the
sampling mission to the council of European ministers that governs ESA when it
meets in November. “Bringing a sample to Earth is within our capabilities,” says
Pillinger. “It will be better in the long run than a sequence of probes.”