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European space officials successfully reposition Mars Express craft

Posted on: Saturday, 20 December 2003, 06:00 CST

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 preparing it for a Christmas Day launch into Martian orbit.

The crucial step comes a day after Mars Express successfully separated from the unmanned Beagle 2 surface probe, sending the lander on its trajectory toward Mars. Hours before Mars Express is to begin orbiting the planet, the British-built probe is to bounce to a soft landing on the Martian surface, where it will gather and sample rocks for evidence of organic matter and water.

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.

To send the probe on its trajectory toward Mars, the mothercraft had to be positioned so that it was on a collision course with the planet. 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 Mars Express, officials said.

The repositioning was the first in a series of commands needed to get Mars Express into place so that on Dec. 25, it can fire its main engine for about 30 minutes, sending it into Martian orbit, around 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the surface. Once there, the Express will use radar to penetrate the surface looking for layers of water or ice -- besides relaying data from the Beagle 2 to mission control.

The Mars Express mission -- Europe's first to the Red Planet -- will try to determine if there are signs that life existed on the planet.

Of 34 unmanned American, Soviet and Russian missions to Mars since 1960, two-thirds ended in failure.

(me)

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