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Let's go to Mars

Europe arrives at Mars; Beagle 2 does not call home

Mars Express slid into orbit on Christmas morning. Beagle 2, released six days earlier, went silent — and was found in 2015 on the ground, partly unfolded.

A Beagle 2 model seen from above on a round orange plinth behind glass. Four petal-shaped solar panels, tiled with blue-grey cells and each pierced by a round hole, lie flat around a black circular disc marked with a painted gold square. Behind them a gold bowl holds circuit boards and small instruments, with a jointed silver robotic arm reaching out from it toward the upper left.
A model of Beagle 2, photographed at the Science Museum in London, opened out as the lander was meant to open on Isidis Planitia. All four solar panels had to swing clear to expose the radio antenna beneath them. · Image: geni, via Wikimedia Commons

Mars Express launched on a Soyuz-Fregat from Baikonur on 2 June 2003, released Beagle 2 on 19 December and braked into orbit on Christmas morning. ESA's first mission to another planet, it was built in about four years on Rosetta's structure, several of its eight instruments rebuilt from designs orphaned when Russia's Mars 96 came back down in 1996.

The orbiter is still working. Its OMEGA spectrometer found phyllosilicates — clays — in the oldest terrain; on Earth these form where water sits on rock near neutral pH, splitting Martian history into an early wet chapter and a later sulfurous, acidic one. Its MARSIS radar sounded kilometres into the polar caps, on two twenty-metre booms that sat folded for eighteen months while engineers argued whether release would whip them back into the spacecraft. The 687-day design life passed more than two decades ago; ESA has confirmed operations to the end of 2026 and provisionally to 2028, partly to support Japan's MMX sample-return mission to Phobos.

Beagle 2 was a 33-kilogram clamshell about a metre across closed, pushed through by Colin Pillinger of the Open University on a budget partly from sponsorship. It carried a mass spectrometer for methane and carbon isotope ratios, a rock grinder, and a burrowing mole to fetch soil from beneath a boulder. It was to call Mars Odyssey on Christmas Day. Jodrell Bank heard nothing, and Mars Express nothing in January. The management board declared it lost on 6 February 2004; the inquiry, unable to identify a cause, criticised the thin funding and management arrangements.

In January 2015 ESA announced that Michael Croon, a retired Mars Express operations engineer, had spotted a bright object in NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images of Isidis Planitia, roughly where it belonged. The HiRISE team confirmed it, rear cover and parachute nearby. It had survived entry, descent and landing intact, some or all of its four solar panels open — all four had to open to expose the radio antenna underneath.