Martian Missives - The Race for Mars
-Editor's Weekly Ramblings 40
Friday 23rd Jan 2004
Martian Missives
Back in June I wrote about the Missions to Mars which were launched by Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA). As you are no doubt now aware ESA's Beagle 2, which had been due to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, failed to make contact. And the last realistic window of opportunity seems to be about to close on the 24th/25th January with final attempts for Beagle 2 to go into communications search-mode with the Mars Express orbiter. I am writing this prior to that and so I don't have a crystal ball as to whether it will succeed, but it does seem a long-shot. This is very sad news, because everything had gone exactly according to plan until the Beagle 2 deployment stage. And whilst the Mars Express orbiter seems to be working fine and is sending back some great images of the red planet, it is a shame that the sexy, 'seek out new life, and new civilisations' part of the mission looks unlikely to be realised.
It would be all too easy to criticise the ESA team, and in fact until Spirit, Nasa's first Martian Rover, ran into a few communications difficulties itself today. Most of the press had seemed only too happy to jump on the 'How come the Americans can do it whilst Europe screws it up?' bandwagon. When the truth is that ESA (and Nasa) put together a good mission that has most likely just been unlucky in the spot where Beagle 2 has landed; possibly in a canyon, or behind some other obstacle that is not making communication possible.
It may have crashed, had a battery or computer failure or any other manner of problem, but seeing as everything seemed fine right up to deployment it seems more likely that Beagle 2 has just been unfortunate in its landing. This is something that can only be controlled to a limited extent when planning such missions, and is just one of the many hazards of unmanned space missions.
On the positive side The Mars Express Orbiter is working fine so far, and sent back its first pictures on the 14th January. It's mission is defined by ESA as follows:
- image the entire surface at high resolution (10 m/pixel) and selected areas at super resolution (2 m/pixel)
- produce a map of the mineral composition of the surface at 100 m resolution
-
map the composition of the atmosphere and determine its global circulation
-
determine the structure of the sub-surface to a depth of a few kilometres
-
determine the effect of the atmosphere on the surface
-
determine the interaction of the atmosphere with the solar wind
 Credit ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) Picture taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board E     
No comments yet - be the first to have your say!
  Please copy the 5 symbols from this security code image into the box below to submit comment.   
About | Privacy policy | Terms & conditions |
