The Beagle 2 spacecraft, which vanished during an attempt to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, may have been found near the British probe's intended landing site on the planet.
The UK Space Agency said in a briefing that it will be announcing an update to the Beagle 2 on Jan. 16, Friday. However, the agency refused to release more details in advance.
The Times, however, reported that a senior space scientist said that images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed an object "about the right shape and in about the right place" as the Beagle 2.
"It tells us how close it got to the right landing spot and that it was in one piece," the paper's source added.
University of Arizona scientist Shane Byrne, who operates the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, told the Guardian that the HiRise is the only camera that can spot the Beagle 2 on Mars, and that the Mars probe would have landed close to its planned spot "no matter what."
HiRise camera operators have been looking for Beagle 2 for several years, as the same team has already spotted other spacecraft that landed on Mars such as the twin Viking landers that touched down on the planet's surface in the 1970s.
The Beagle 2 Mars probe was on board the Mars Express orbiter of the European Space Agency, and was developed to look for signs of life on Mars, whether it be past or present. The spacecraft was released from the orbiter on Dec. 19, 2003, but the signal that would have confirmed that the Beagle 2 landed on Christmas Day on Mars never came.
A report on the failure of Beagle 2 was not able to make a definite explanation of the sudden disappearance of the Mars probe. It was considered unlikely that Beagle 2 was not able to land on Mars, or that the spacecraft burned up while entering the planet's atmosphere. Other speculations involved malfunctions of the parachutes and airbags of the Beagle 2, which the spacecraft used to safely land on the surface of Mars.
Colin Pillinger, who passed away in May last year, was the man behind the development and operations of the Beagle 2. In 2005, he claimed that images taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor in 2005 showed fuzzy pictures of the spacecraft close to its planned landing site, though confirmation was never made.
Pillinger thought that Beagle 2 landed on the planet's surface too hard, due to a thinner than usual atmosphere caused by dust storms.
