Thanks to NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a long lost space probe is now found.
The UK's Beagle 2 reached the surface of Mars on Christmas Day in 2003, after being transported there by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express mission. Unfortunately, though, all communication from Beagle 2 ended after its supposed landing, so those scientists involved with the endeavor never learned what happened to it.
However, now, three photos taken with a high resolution camera on the MRO discovered the Beagle 2, finally answering a decade-old question of if the lander even made it to Mars. Most thought it never arrived at the planet, caught up in the atmosphere, or that it possibly crashed on the surface.
"My Christmas Day in 2003 alongside many others who worked on Beagle 2 was ruined by the disappointment of not receiving data from the surface of Mars," says Mark Sims, of the University of Leicester, who served on the team responsible for the Beagle 2. "To be frank I had all but given up hope of ever knowing what happened to Beagle 2. The images show that we came so close to achieving the goal of science on Mars."
The images picked up a series of bright white spots that indicate where the Beagle 2 landed. Because the spots appear in all three images, it's highly likely that the spots represent the Beagle 2. Additional analysis of the photos confirmed this, by checking both the size and shape of the object discovered. Also, the location of the white spots are within the area where its team thought it would land.
Scientists now believe that "petals" mounted on Beagle 2's solar panels didn't properly deploy. This prevented the radio frequency antenna from functioning, resulting in a loss of communication with the lander.
"The failure cause is pure speculation, but it could have been, and probably was, down to sheer bad luck— a heavy bounce perhaps distorting the structure as clearances on solar panel deployment weren't big; or a punctured and slowly leaking airbag not separating sufficiently from the lander, causing a hang-up in deployment," says Sims.
The MRO is the only craft orbiting Mars capable of picking up an object as small as the landing craft, which is only about 7 feet wide, especially in an area so vast. NASA scientists hope that this discovery gives the Beagle 2 team a sense of closure.
[Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona/University of Leicester]
