Beagle 2 - 20 years later
- 6th Dec 2023
- Author: Ed Turner
In 1997, the European Space Agency, ESA, was planning its first mission to another planet: Mars Express. ESA hoped to insert Mars Express into orbit around Mars to study the atmosphere, surface and subsurface, as well as Mars’ two moons Phobos and Deimos. This mission was missing a vital component, however. At least, that’s what Colin Pillinger of The Open University thought.
Mission Background
As part of ESA's first mission to Mars, Colin Pillinger, a planetary scientist at The Open University, along with collaborators from the University of Leicester, devised a lander component for the Mars Express mission. He called it Beagle 2, after HMS Beagle that carried Charles Darwin to the Americas. The lander would study the Martian surface in an attempt to find evidence of life in Mars’ history.
Designing the lander wouldn’t be easy though. The UK government only signed off on around £45 million for the whole mission, compared to the nearly $3 billion NASA allocated for the Perseverance rover which launched in 2020. Not only this, but there were incredibly fine weight margins allowed so as to not disrupt the main Mars Express spacecraft that Beagle 2 was piggybacking on.
To achieve this, lots of the work was donated or done at cost, and incredible engineering work miniaturised large scientific instruments, resulting in the whole lander package, including parachutes, heatshield and airbags, weighing only 69kg.
Instrumentation
Most of Beagle 2’s scientific instruments were located on a metre-long robotic arm called the Payload Adjustable Workbench, or PAW. It included anything you would need in the hunt for Martian life, including cameras, a microscope, and spectrometers. The PAW also had a drill to collect rock samples, which it would then pass into a spectrometer and gas chromatograph in the main body of the lander to analyse the samples.
Additionally, Beagle 2 had the ability to deploy a small sample retrieval tool called PLUTO. Nicknamed the mole, it could burrow up to 1.5 metres into the surface before returning the sample to the lander. For reference, both the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers currently on the Martian surface drill around 6cm into the rocks they are sampling.
Getting the Public Interested
Though he had managed to convince the UK government and ESA, Pillinger also wanted to capture the imagination of the general public. To achieve this, he turned to British artists. For the call sign that Beagle 2 would send back to Earth to confirm it landed, he asked Blur to create a song, which can be heard here. For the image calibration test that would ensure Beagle’s cameras were working, Pillinger asked Damien Hurst to create one of his iconic spot pictures.
Pillinger also utilised the media, appearing on several news shows and creating photo opportunities, such as at the reveal of Beagle 2 where he wheeled the scale model into the room in a shopping trolley to show off its compactness.
Further to this, members of the public were invited to watch scientists and engineers working on the mission, the first of its kind in Europe. To facilitate this the Lander Operations Control Centre found a home right here at the National Space Centre.
The Christmas That Never Happened
On 19 December 2003, Beagle 2 separated from Mars Express with all systems ready for entry into the Martian atmosphere six days later.
A heat shield would protect the lander from the extreme heating of entering the atmosphere at 12,000 mph, and parachutes would slow Beagle 2’s speed before airbags would inflate to protect it during landing.
At 2:45 AM on Christmas Day 2003, scientists all across the country, including at the University of Leicester and at the National Space Centre, waited for Beagle 2 to contact Earth.
Sadly, no such signal came, and it soon dawned on the team that Beagle 2 had been lost, though no one knew how. It was possible the craft had skimmed off the atmosphere and back into deep space, or burned up in Mars’ atmosphere, or even simply crashed into the surface at high speed.
Spotted on Mars
On 16 January 2015, more than eleven years after its disappearance, it was announced that Beagle 2 had been found on the surface of Mars. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft captured images of Beagle 2’s landing site, and rather than a crash landing as had been expected, it seemed that Beagle 2 had not only landed safely but had also begun its start-up procedure.
Image analysis showed only two or three of the four solar panels unfurled, which was a problem as the communications dish was hidden beneath the stowed solar panels. This means even if Beagle 2 had deployed the PAW and begun to take samples, it would have had no way of sending any scientific data back to Earth.
This is far from a failure, however. Around 50% of Mars missions fail, some before they even get to Mars. For Beagle 2 to survive re-entry and successfully touch down on the surface is a huge achievement and puts the UK in the history books as the third country to land a spacecraft on another planet.
The Legacy of Beagle 2
Even though Beagle 2 could not communicate with us, its legacy lives on in several aspects. Firstly, many of the Beagle 2 team went on to work on other important space missions, with Pillinger himself pushing for the inclusion of a lander, named Philae, as part of the Rosetta mission. This was the first successful landing on a comet.
The other aspect of Beagle 2’s legacy is the people it inspired: a new generation of British scientists, engineers and astronomers. One person in particular Beagle 2 inspired was me. I remember coming to the National Space Centre when I was a kid and drawing a picture about what I thought had happened to Beagle 2 (a big dinosaur ate it!). I’ve been fascinated by space ever since, and now I work as a science communicator at the very place that inspired me. Maybe you too can find inspiration from the plucky little spacecraft that went from being wheeled around in a shopping trolley all the way to the surface of Mars.
Full references / credits:
(Banner image) Artist’s impression of Beagle 2 fully deployed on the surface of Mars. Credit: ESA
(1) Colin Pillinger next to a model of Beagle 2. Credit: The Open University
(2) Beagle 2’s science arm, known as the PAW. Credit: ESA
(3a) Outside the Beagle 2 control centre at the National Space Centre. Credit: National Space Centre/University of Leicester/Beagle 2 Team
(3b) The Beagle 2 team working in view of some excited school children. Credit: National Space Centre/University of Leicester/Beagle 2 Team
(4) Beagle 2 (top right) being released by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. Credit: ESA
(5a) Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars. Credit: HiRISE/NASA/University of Leicester
(5b) Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars with overlay. Credit: HiRISE/NASA/University of Leicester
(6) An artist’s impression of the Philae lander on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA
