Probe detaches from Mars craft for Christmas Day landing
Probe detaches from Mars craft for Christmas Day landing
By MELISSA EDDY Associated Press
Saturday, December 20, 2003
Darmstadt, Germany — The Beagle 2 Mars probe successfully detached Friday from its mother ship, a critical maneuver that put the European spacecraft on track for a Christmas Day landing on the Red Planet.
The unmanned probe, named for the ship that carried naturalist Charles Darwin on his voyage of discovery in the 1830s, will explore the Martian soil to determine whether it ever supported life.
After it parachutes through the atmosphere and uses inflatable gas bags to bounce to a soft landing, the 143-pound probe will flip open and begin scratching the surface with a robotic arm.
Meanwhile, the Mars Express mother ship will orbit 250 miles above, using a powerful radar to look for layers of water or ice and relaying data from the Beagle 2 back to mission control.
“It’s not looking for little green men, but it is looking for matter that might provide evidence of life,” said David Southwood, the European Space Agency’s director of science.
Pictures beamed back Friday from the Mars Express showed Beagle 2 as a small white disk slowly moving away against a black background littered with stars — final confirmation that the probe had been successfully sent spinning toward Mars.
The maneuver involved a series of 115 commands that included turning Mars Express away from Earth, causing it to lose contact with mission control for about two hours. It was only after screens in the control room began flashing red in confirmation that the engineers’ tension melted into relief and excitement.
“Mother and baby are both doing very well,” Southwood announced. “But we’ve got to wait until Christmas Day to make the next major step.”
He said the Beagle 2 is equipped with devices that will collect soil samples, heat them up and “see what comes off.”
Beagle 2 is expected to transmit its first pictures in early January. Around the same time, two NASA rovers are to land on Mars to concentrate on geology and mapping its surface.
On the Net: www.beagle2.com