Introduction

The Beagle 2 project is the British led effort to land on Mars as part of the European Space Agency's Mars Express Mission, launched in June 2003.
In 1997 ESA announced a mission called Mars Express to be launched in 2003, the possibility of a lander dedicated to looking for life and conducting geochemical/atmospheric analyses was put forward by The Open University's Professor Colin Pillinger, a member of the ESA Exobiology Study Group

Within a few days the name of the lander became Beagle 2 to celebrate Charles Darwin's epic voyage which led to the writing of On the Origin of Species.
The lander destined for Mars as part of ESA's Mars Express Mission will carry the instruments necessary to search for the signatures of life; it's name Beagle 2 commemorates Darwin's ship and the voyage which he called "the most important event in my life".

Mars Express is the first 'flexible mission' in the revised ESA long-term scientific programme. Mars Express left Earth for Mars in 18:45:28 BST June 2003 when the positions of the two planets made for the shortest possible route, a condition that occurs once every twenty-six months. The intrepid spacecraft started its six-month journey from the Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan onboard a Russian Soyuz/Fregat launcher.

Mars Express began the six-month interplanetary cruise at a velocity of 10 800 km/h relative to Earth. Five days before arrival in December 2003, Mars Express ejected the Beagle 2 lander, which hopefully will make its own way to the correct landing site on the surface. The orbiter will then manoeuvre into a highly elliptical capture orbit, from which it can move into its operational near-polar orbit.

Mars Express will help answer questions concerning the creation and evolution of the Martian landscape by mapping the Martian sub-surface, surface, atmosphere and ionosphere from orbit.

Mars Express is Europe’s first spacecraft to the Red Planet. It carries seven instruments and a lander. The orbiter instruments are soon to remotely investigate the Martian atmosphere, surface and subsurface. Beagle 2, the lander, will perform on-the-spot measurements and also search for signs of past life.

Mars Express, together with its lander, is an important element of the international flotilla of spacecraft destined to explore Mars. Mars Express comprises a number of essential components - the spacecraft, its instruments, the lander, the ground segment, and the launcher. An experienced team of engineers in ESA and industry and hundreds of international scientists are combining these elements into a space mission.

One of the main objectives is to search for traces of water in the subsurface, through the atmosphere, and all the way up to free space. The lander will perform on-the-spot analyses on the Martian surface. Seven scientific instruments on board the orbiting spacecraft will perform a series of remote sensing experiments designed to shed new light on the Martian atmosphere, the atmospheric structure, and geology.

Beagle 2 will be the next lander to conduct a full suite of life detection experiments on Mars. Beagle 2 was scheduled to land on Mars at 2.54am GMT, 25th December 2003. As yet, contact has not been made with Beagle 2. The next phase will be to initiate a period of radio silence where no communication attempts will be made with Beagle 2 until the 22nd January. Adopting this approach will force Beagle 2 into communication search mode 2 [CSM2] where the probe will automatically transmit a signal throughout the Martian day while conserving power during the night.

Beagle 2's plunge through the thin atmosphere of Mars, slowed by parachutes and cushioned by airbags, was predicted to have been the most dangerous part of the mission. It is feared that Beagle crashed on landing and is lying in fragments strewn across the Martian surface. If it had landed successfully, Beagle 2 would have spent 180 days searching for signs of life above and below the surface of Mars.

Beagle 2 is the smallest, most heavily instrumented soft landing spacecraft ever produced. As such it will be a possible precursor of a follow-up to Mars Express or for other missions for construction of a network of geophysical stations on Mars.

Landing the Beagle 2 on Mars

Beagle 2 will separate from the mothercraft. This involved the use of a spring mechanism which pushes the lander away whilst making it spin on its axis for stability. The whole process is carried out by a 1.6kg device called the spinup and eject mechanism (SUEM).

The bright spot on the left-hand side of this picture is the back side of Beagle 2, slowly drifting away from Mars Express. This image was taken on the morning of December 19th 2003 at 9:33 CET, showing the lander about 20 metres away from the mother spacecraft, on its way to Mars.

The Beagle 2 is expected to hurtle towards the surface at 14,000 mph making the Mars Express free to make manoeuvres to place itself in orbit.
During the descent phase the heat shield brakes the lander from its interplanetary velocity, energy being lost by frictional heating. Firing the parachute deployment device (PDD) through a patch in the back cover, deploys a pilot chute whose role is to divide the space craft into two sections whilst pulling the main chute from its stowed position. Pyrotechnic bolts explode to drop the heat shield.

The gas-bags are inflated by a gas generator at 200m above the surface (as detected by a radar altimeter) and on first contact the device releases the main parachute so that the lander can bounce away from underneath the canopy. When the whole package comes to rest, a system of laces holding the three gas-bags onto the lander is cut allowing them to reform and roll away, dropping Beagle 2 onto the surface.Irrespective of which way up it falls a hinge will open the clam shell to start the science phase of the mission.

Beagle 2 is supposed to land in a region of Mars named Isidis Planitia. This is a 1500 km wide embayment into the highlands that occupy much of the martian equatorial region and southern hemisphere, whose northeast side opens onto the low-lying plains that cover most of the planet's northern hemisphere.

Isidis Planitia is probably a very ancient impact basin caused by the collision of a comet or a 50 km diameter asteroid onto the surface of Mars about 3-4 billion years ago. Subsequently its floor may have become flooded by volcanic lava before being further buried by sediment derived from the surrounding highlands.

A major factor in selecting Isidis as the landing site is that it is low lying (to give the parachutes chance to work), and slightly north of the equator (to take advantage of the relatively warm spring nights and thus minimise the thermal stress on Beagle 2's electronics).

A number of sites were considered as the possible location where Beagle 2 will come to rest. The feature that all the sites had in common was that they showed evidence of fluvial processing by large volumes of water.

Other criteria taken into consideration were the altitude and latitude on Mars. Too high and there is insufficient atmospheric density to allow the Beagle 2 parachutes to slow the lander for a safe touch down. Both height and also too far north or south away from the equator will increase the need for additional thermal protection as the climate worsens.

The northern hemisphere is our favoured destination because here in the martian lowlands the planet will be coming from spring into summer during the time Beagle is working in 2004.

When seeking safe conditions for a Beagle 2 landing site the team had to consider slopes and the frequency and angularity of boulders. The spacecraft needs to find some rocks to carry out its programme of scientific investigations but not so many that the gas-filled impact protection is ruptured and bursts.
The final decision about where to land was needed in 2001 to allow ESA controllers to work out the details of the Mars Express flight plan.

Vist the Beagle 2 Website for additional and Up to date information
After the loss of two Mars missions in 1999, NASA announced that its plans for returning samples from the red planet in conjunction with the French Space Agency, CNES, would have to be postponed for almost a decade. Instead of a programme of landers and orbiters every two years, landing and orbiting will alternate.

In 2001 NASA launched an orbiter called Odyssey. Two years later, a few days after Beagle 2 touches down on Mars it will be followed by the Mars Exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which will trundle from rock to rock photographing and performing inorganic chemical and mineralogical analyses.

Exploration Rovers - Spirit and Opportunity

NASA's twin robot geologists, Spirit and Opportunity the Mars Exploration Rovers, launched toward Mars on June 10 and July 7, 2003, in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. They are scheduled to land on Mars January 3 and January 24 PST (January 4 and January 25 UTC).

NASA's twin rovers, have been cruising through the frigid temperatures of space toward Mars for seven months, traveling about 300 million miles
The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet.

Primary among the mission's scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The spacecraft are targeted to sites on opposite sides of Mars that appear to have been affected by liquid water in the past. The landing sites are at Gusev Crater, a possible former lake in a giant impact crater, and Meridiani Planum, where mineral deposits (hematite) suggest Mars had a wet past.

After the airbag-protected landing craft settle onto the surface and open, the rovers will roll out to take panoramic images. These will give scientists the information they need to select promising geological targets that will tell part of the story of water in Mars' past. Then, the rovers will drive to those locations to perform on-site scientific investigations over the course of their 90-day mission.

The goal for the rover is to drive up to 40 meters (about 44 yards) in a single day, for a total of up to one 1 kilometer (about three-quarters of a mile). Moving from place to place, the rovers will perform on-site geological investigations. Each rover is sort of the mechanical equivalent of a geologist walking the surface of Mars. The mast-mounted cameras are mounted 1.5 meters(5 feet) high and will provide 360-degree, stereoscopic, humanlike views of the terrain.

The robotic arm will be capable of movement in much the same way as a human arm with an elbow and wrist, and will place instruments directly up against rock and soil targets of interest. In the mechanical "fist" of the arm is a microscopic camera that will serve the same purpose as a geologist's handheld magnifying lens. The Rock Abrasion Tool serves the purpose of a geologist's rock hammer to expose the insides of rocks

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers are the result of an extensive overhaul of NASA's Mars exploration program in the wake of two devastating failures in 1999. One spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, crashed because of a software oversight that resulted in a premature engine shutdown.

The other, the Mars Climate Orbiter, burned up in the martian atmosphere because of an embarrassing metric-to-English conversion snafu.

Spirit traveled 487 million kilometers (302.6 million) miles to reach Mars after its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on June 10, 2003. Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully landed on January 3, 2004 at 8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard time. Opportunity is scheduled to land later on January 24.

Spirit successfully sent a radio signal after the spacecraft had bounced and rolled for several minutes following its initial impact at 11:35 p.m. EST (8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard Time) on January 3.

Opportunity (Mars Exploration Rover B) is identical to Rover A , Spirit and is schedule to arrvie shortly on Mars at the above site.