ESA Science News
02 Dec 1999
Europe prepares its own Mars mission, as NASA’s probe lands on Mars
Just before NASA’s Mars Polar Lander bounces to a gentle halt on Mars this week, it will jettison two small probes that
will crash into the planet and penetrate its surface. Four years later, in December 2003, another probe will land on the
red planet to take a look underground. Called Beagle 2, it will hitch a ride to Mars on Europe’s Mars Express mission.
NASA’s probes will be looking mainly for water and ice, but Beagle 2 will also be searching for the signs of life.
The European Space Agency gave final approval for Beagle 2 to fly on Mars Express at a meeting of its Science
Programme Committee (SPC) last month. The UK team that is building the lander convinced the SPC that technical and
engineering progress is on target for launch in June 2003. The SPC also accepted that Professor Colin Pillinger, the
principal investigator from the Open University, has a viable plan for raising enough public and private finance to pay
for Beagle. “We can now go full steam ahead and get up to speed with everybody else on the mission,” says Pillinger.
Beagle 2 will look for signs of life below the Martian surface because any that once existed above ground will have been
“burnt by the Sun”, says Andre Brack, chairman of a group of scientists interested in using Beagle’s results. Beagle 2
will have a robotic arm on which will be mounted a drill and a grinder to remove the outer weathered rind of rocks and
expose the pristine interior for analysis. The arm will also carry a “mole” which will burrow down through the soil to
pick up samples in its “mouth” from depths of about a metre. All rock and soil samples will be subjected to chemical
analysis to determine their type, origins and whether they harbour signs of extinct life. Beagle will also look for
evidence of existing life in the atmosphere.
Mars Express helps make up for the loss of NASA’s Climate Orbiter
Mars Polar Lander was to have relayed the data it has gathered back to Earth via Mars Climate Orbiter. But the loss of
that spacecraft in September forced a change of plan and the link in the data chain will now be Mars Global Surveyor,
which was already in orbit around the red planet. Beagle 2 will probably make similar use of Mars Express, which will
be orbiting around the Martian poles while seven
instruments on board make remote observations. At its meeting
last month, ESA’s SPC approved changes to two of the orbiting
instruments. SPICAM, an instrument to measure the spatial variation in composition of the atmosphere, will now be able
to look at the atmosphere in the infrared as well as the ultraviolet. “This will enable SPICAM to map the water content of
the atmosphere and
take over some of the objectives that were lost with Mars Climate Observer,” says Agustin Chicarro, Mars Express
project scientist at ESA’s technical centre, ESTEC in the Netherlands. “Water vapour is the most important gas for
picturing the conditions for life on Mars, now and in the past. At present, it enters the atmosphere when the northern icy
polar cap warms up each summer. But there are huge
variations from one year to the next that are not at all understood, and require constant monitoring from space
missions,” says
Jean-Loup Bertaux, principal investigator for SPICAM from the
Service d’Aeronomie du CNRS, Verrieres-le-Buisson, France.
An up-grade to the High Resolution Stereoscopic Camera (HRSC)
was also approved. “The HRSC will still map the whole surface of Mars with 10-20m resolution. But an additional super
resolution
channel will now allow specific areas of interest to be mapped
down to a resolution of 2m. We will just be able to pick out Beagle 2 on the surface,” says Gerhard Neukum, HRSC
principal investigator from the Institut fur Weltraumsensorik und Planetenerkundung in
Berlin.
For further information contact:
Professor Colin Pillinger
Planetary Science research Institute
Open University, UK
Tel. +44 1908 652119 Fax. +44 1908 655910
E-mail: psri@open.ac.uk
Dr Andre Brack
Centre de Biophysique Moelculaire
Orleans, France
Tel. +33 238 255576 Fax. +33 238631517
E-mail: brack@cnrs-orleans.fr
Dr Jean-Loup Bertaux
Service d’Aeronomie du CNRS
Verrieres-le-Buisson
France
Tel. +33 1 64474251 Fax. +33 1 69202999
E-mail: Jean-loup.bertaux@aerov.jussieu.fr
Professor Gerhard Neukum
Institut fur Weltsraumsensorik und Planetenerkundung, DLR
Berlin, Germany
Tel. +49 30 67055300
mobile: +49 171 7647177
Fax. +49 30 67055303
E-mail: gerhard.neukum@dlr.de
Agustin Chicarro
ESTEC, Noordwijk
The Netherlands
Tel. +31 715 5653613 Fax. +31 715 5654697
E-mail: achicarr@estec.esa.nl
USEFUL LINKS FOR THIS STORY
* Mars Express homepage
http://sci.esa.int/marsexpress
* Beagle 2 homepage
http://beagle2.open.ac.uk/beagle2/index.htm
* HRSC homepage
http://solarsystem.dlr.de/FE/hrsc.shtml
[IMAGE CAPTIONS:
http://sci.esa.int/newsitem.cfm?TypeID=1&ContentID=8051&Storytype=22]
[Image 1]
Artist impression of the Mars Express spacecraft
[Image 2]
Model of the Beagle 2 lander
