The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

orbit around Mars. This was the first time that an orbiter delivered a lander without its own propulsion onto a planet, and attempted orbit insertion immediately afterwards.

Unfortunately no signal from Beagle 2 was ever received although Mars Express sent back significant pictures and information from orbit. It is thought that the atmospheric conditions at the time Beagle 2 attempted to land resulted in it being destroyed upon impact.

On 24 January 2004 Dr John Murray of the Mars Express team stated:

Scientists are on the threshold of the most exciting discovery about humanity’s place in the Universe since Galileo and Copernicus proved that the Earth goes round the Sun.

The European Mars Express spacecraft has determined beyond reasonable doubt that water, the prerequisite for all forms of terrestrial life, still exists on the Red Planet, and that it once flowed in torrents across its surface.

These remarkable revelations about our celestial neighbour provide the most tantalising evidence yet that the miracle of life on earth may not be unique, even within the confines of the solar system.

Wherever water is found on the Blue Planet – from the tundra of Antarctica to the depths of the ocean floor – we know there is life. For life as we know it, we need water. Now we can be certain that this vital commodity is present, and may once have been abundant, on the surface of Mars.

It seems more probable than ever that the planet so long considered barren and inert, may once have supported life.

It would be no exageration to compare such a discovery to the Copernican revolution, which put paid to the notion that the Earth stood at the centre of the Universe, or the voyages of Columbus and Magellan, proving the world to be round. It would mean that life has arisen twice on planets separated by as little as 35 million miles. And if that is so, it is probably common throughout the Universe.

We are not quite there yet. Neither Mars Express, nor NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers, are designed to test the soil and rock for the chemical evidence that would provide definitive proof. Indeed, the European Probe’s results make it more frustrating than ever that Beagle 2, the British lander that was sent to Mars specifically to search for life, remains incommunicado.

The evidence of water, in the form of ice, makes it yet more important that we refuse to give up and dispatch Beagles 3, 4 and 5 to the Red Planet to resume the search.

We should not hold our breath for intelligent Martian life. Anything we find there will be extremely primitive, hardy microorganisms that can cope with extreme cold and harmful ultraviolet rays. These can live under the most unlikely of conditions: the Apollo moon landings turned up microorganisms carried years before as passengers on an unmanned probe.

Martian life could be found in the form of fossils that died out long ago. Or it could survive in certain suitable zones. The search will be a little like opening a window on the Earth billions of years ago.

There are times when science is more like hearing a Beethoven quartet than poring over reams of numbers. Yesterday was one of those occasions.

To look at the pictures from Mars Express’s high-resolution stereo camera was to see something so supremely beautiful that I had to remind myself it was science, not art. These images would not have looked out of place at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

Yet they tell us so much. There can be little doubt that the vast channel of Reull Vallis was carved by flowing water. It has water deposition and erosion: there is no way it could be anything else. When we look at Valles Marineris, it is as if we are gazing on the canyons and mesas that are so familiar to us from the American South West. It is a landscape of desolation and grandeur, but one that might possibly have harboured life.

This voyage of discovery encompasses so many great aspects of human endeavour. Important scientific advances are being made. But it is also advancing the achievement of the human race.

On 27 January 2004 Professor Colin Pillinger, the chief scientist of Beagle 2, was interviewed in The Times. When the loss of Beagle 2 was described as a heroic failure, he said:

“I don’t want to be a heroic failure. We would still like to be a heroic success, and we’ve done enough – if we don’t find it this time – to merit a second chance.”

Mars Express had found direct evidence of water on Mars. When he was asked about it he said:

“None of us thought there wasn’t water on Mars. I’ve seen it in my own Martian meteorites. But this is not a discovery of water. It was a very elegant demonstration of it.”

Professor Pillinger became interested in space years before Sputnik went into orbit in 1957, his mind catapulted starwards by the BBC radio programme Journey into Space.

Professor Pillinger compared the ESA and NASA missions:

Sending up two probes at once doubled NASA’s chances of hitting Mars at the closest it will come to Earth for 60,000 years, but Spirit was a better bet than Beagle even if it had been flying solo. While it had 24 air cushions and retro rockets to break its fall, Beagle had just the two airbags. Pillinger points out that Mars Express, the European spacecraft on which Beagle hitched a ride, could not have carried cargo anything as heavy as that so blame the lightweight European space programme.

But if only the dream had come true! The great future that lies beyond Beagle is more glorious than anything the American Rovers can aspire to. While NASA is merely looking for water, a precondition for life, Pillinger sought life itself.

He explained to me how the origins of his quest lay in the 1976Viking mission to the planet, which concluded that there was no life there. NASA turned its back on Mars and scooted off to explore the rest of the universe. But Viking later provided chemists with evidence that some meteorites that had been found in the Antarctic were Martian. It was while Pillinger and other scientists were examining their gas content to see if it matched the Martian atmosphere that they found, to their immense surprise, that there were traces of carbonates in them – evidence of life. Controversial at first, this finding was gradually accepted, the only remaining doubt being the worry that the samples could have been contaminated. It was to banish this doubt that Beagle was sent to conduct the same geochemical experiments on Mars to find the chemical fossils of extraterrestrials.

Had things gone differently, by the middle of next month Pillinger might well have been able to announce that he had found the first proof of extraterrestal life.

NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter went into orbit around Mars during 2001, then in 2003 NASA launched another Mars exploration project called MER (Mars Exploration Rover). On 10 June and 7 July 2003 they launched spacecraft toward Mars, each spacecraft carrying a Mars Exploration Rover. Like the ESA Mars Express mission, the rovers were in search of answers about the history of water on Mars and were scheduled to land on 3 January and 24 January PST (4 January and 25 January UTC).

The first rover landed on 4 January 2004. Called Spirit by NASA, it was a six-wheeled vehicle about the size of a golf cart and was equipped to play the role of a geological explorer.

Spirit immediately transmitted a range of black and white images, including a sweeping panoramic of the Martian landscape, as well as a bird’s-eye view of the rover with its solar panels fully deployed.

Mission science manager John Callas said:

“This just keeps getting better and better. The pictures are fantastic.”

The total cost of the MER project was ?545 million.

When NASA’s first Mars Exploration rover landed on Mars, Mark Henderson, Science