Controllers Reposition Mars Express Spacecraft
By MELISSA EDDY
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — European space controllers said they repositioned the Mars Express spacecraft Saturday, steering it away from its collision course with the Red Planet and moving it toward Martian orbit on Christmas.
The crucial maneuver comes a day after the Mars Express successfully separated from the unmanned Beagle 2 surface probe, sending the lander on its trajectory toward Mars.
Beagle 2, named for the ship that carried naturalist Charles Darwin on his voyage of discovery in the 1830s, had been riding piggyback on Mars Express since its June 2 launching atop a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Mars Express had to be positioned on a collision course with the planet to send Beagle 2 toward Mars. Less than an hour after the successful ejection was confirmed, flight controllers at the European Space Agency’s mission control in the western German city of Darmstadt began sending a new series of commands to reposition the mother ship, a spokesman said.
“Everything went normally and took place in a good atmosphere,” European Space Agency spokesman Bernard von Weyhe said of Saturday’s repositioning. “We are looking forward to getting Mars Express into final orbit.”
After Beagle 2 parachutes through the atmosphere and uses inflatable gas bags to bounce to a soft landing, the 143-pound British-built probe will flip open and begin scratching the planet’s surface with a robotic arm to gather and sample rocks for evidence of organic matter and water.
Meanwhile, the Mars Express mother ship will orbit 250 miles above, using a powerful radar to look for layers of water or ice. The spacecraft also will relay data from the Beagle 2 back to mission control.
Beagle 2 is expected to transmit its first pictures to mission control in Darmstadt in early January. Around the same time, two NASA rovers are to land on Mars to concentrate on geology and mapping its surface.
Scientists think Mars, which still has frozen water in its ice caps, might have once had liquid water and suitable conditions for life, but lost them billions of years ago.
The European mission is the first search for signs of life on Mars since twin U.S. Viking landers probed the planet in 1976 but sent back inconclusive results.
Of 34 unmanned American, Soviet and Russian missions to Mars since 1960, two-thirds ended in failure.
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