WHILE NASA scientists celebrate finding signs of water on Mars (see “Case clinched for wet Mars”), British scientists are still puzzling over what became of their Mars lander, Beagle 2. Nothing has been heard from the probe since it separated from its mother ship, Mars Express, on 19 December.
At a meeting in London on Monday, the Beagle 2 team announced that it might have spotted the dead lander on the Martian surface in two images from NASA’s orbiting Mars Global Surveyor. The images show a few white “candidate pixels” near the landing site that might be the remains of the probe’s parachutes, airbags and shell. But they are far from conclusive. In one of the images, the white dots sit around the rim of a crater and may only be boulders, while a line of four pixels in the second image, dubbed the “string of pearls”, is thought more likely to be the track of a cosmic ray striking the camera.
Whether the team eventually sees the dead lander or not, it has garnered some clues about what may have gone wrong. Observations by Mars Express suggest the atmosphere is much thinner than was predicted, which could have been fatal for the lander because it relied on the atmosphere’s braking effect to trigger the release of its parachute. Alternatively, a glint on the surface of Beagle 2 in a photo taken as it drifted away from Mars Express suggests some component may have broken off.
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The European Space Agency’s Beagle 2 inquiry is due to report by the end of this month.
