Scientists Wait Anxiously for News of Landing

After nearly seven months through space, Britain’s Beagle 2 spacecraft made a fiery descent through the thin Martian atmosphere, but scientists did not immediately know whether it survived the trip.

The 73-pound lander, the most ambitious exploration effort yet by the European Space Agency, was scheduled to touch down at 6:54 p.m. PST Wednesday.

The team monitoring Beagle’s progress here at London’s Open University had hoped to receive a report from the craft when NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter flew over the landing site at 9:15 p.m. PST, but the flyover passed without any communication occurring.

The team, however, got some good news at 8:11 p.m. PST Wednesday when mission controllers at the European Space Agency’s headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, received a signal from Beagle 2’s mother ship, Mars Express, indicating that the craft had successfully entered orbit around the Red Planet.

The signal from the orbiter’s smaller antenna “was the first good indicator that the burn went well,” flight controller Michael McKay said.

But controllers would not know the full operating status of the spacecraft until three hours later when the orbiter would have turned 180 degrees to point its main antenna toward Earth.

Beagle team members emphasized that the absence of a signal from Beagle within a few hours did not mean that its landing was a failure.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” mission control spokesman Bernhard von Weyhe said. “It can mean it needs more time to be unfolded, or it’s at a funny angle.”

A better opportunity for contact will come about 2:45 p.m. PST today, when Beagle will enter the line of sight of Britain’s massive Jodrell Bank radio telescope.

Scientists will be listening for the nine-note Beagle-has-landed tune specially composed for the occasion by the British pop group Blur, two members of which are space aficionados.

If there is a successful linkup, the lander also will transmit its first picture of the Red Planet’s surface.

The image should be “a wide-angle mirror picture, like looking into the mirror of a motorbike, which should give a view to the horizon of the landing site,” said team member Andrew Coates, of University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory. “That’s what we hope to be unwrapping on Christmas morning.

“It’s very exciting, it’s just like being a child again with all the anticipation of Christmas,” he added. “We hope we’ve all been good enough to get a present.”

Beagle 2, named after the ship in which Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s, is the first of three probes scheduled to land on Mars over the next month.

NASA has two rovers on the way -- one scheduled to land Jan. 3 and the other Jan. 24. The scientists who designed the three craft hope they will provide some answers to the question of whether life ever existed on Mars.

Designed and constructed over a six-year period -- an unusually short time in the space industry -- Beagle is the least expensive probe ever launched to Mars, according to the European Space Agency, which is overseeing the mission. Construction was funded in part by industry and private groups, such as Blur, which composed the craft’s “I am here” theme.

Beagle 2 carries a sophisticated chemical laboratory that will enable it to dig in the soil at its landing site and look for traces of life.

It was risky from the beginning, given that 20 of 36 Mars missions have ended in disaster

Earthbound engineers had done everything they could to prepare the craft for a death-defying plunge to the surface.

As the craft began its descent, all they could do was sit back and hope its on-board computers successfully handled the landing in Mars’ Isidis Planitia basin.

In a little less than eight minutes, the craft’s parachute had to slow its descent from 12,000 mph to near zero. Just before reaching the surface, massive air bags were to be inflated, allowing the craft to bounce like a ball.

Wednesday afternoon, the program’s creator, Open University’s Colin Pillinger, said the Beagle team had been able to narrow down the targeted landing area on the Isidis Planitia basin to a 10.5-by-7-mile patch.

“The other piece of good news is that the dust storm which had been threatening the landing has now abated,” Pillinger said.

Throughout Britain, the anticipation of discovering signs of life on Mars has reached far beyond the scientific community.

Ladbrokes, a popular British bookmaking firm, is taking bets from punters expecting to hear about life on Mars. In the run-up to Christmas the odds have fallen from 33-1 to 25-1.

Beagle 2’s mission also has excited schoolchildren. One 12-year-old, Yasmin Mulholland, wrote to the BBC that life on Mars “would probably be the biggest discovery in our lifetime, so when I’m older I can say to my grandchildren, ‘It was on my 13th Christmas when Beagle 2 landed on the Red Planet Mars.’ ”

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, of Cambridge University, said that if the mission succeeded, it would “make a big difference to our view of life because we don’t know whether life is unique to Earth.”

He compared today’s exploration of “our cosmic habitat” to the exploration of remote parts of Earth 100 years ago.

The mission was all the more engrossing, he said, because “it is very cost effective and, therefore, very high risk.... We are spending a very small amount compared to NASA, but I think the European space program has been cost effective because it has avoided manned space flights or stations.”

The total cost of the Beagle 2 mission is estimated at $350 million, whereas NASA’s Mars Rovers cost $400 million each.

Pillinger said that whatever happens, the Beagle program already has given a big boost to European space exploration.

“When we began, there were no space programs for ESA,” he said. “Now they are considering Aurora -- a program which will explore the solar system.”

Mars Express will take three-dimensional pictures of the Martian surface and use a high-powered radar to probe beneath the surface for deposits of water.

It also will relay pictures and data from Beagle 2, but will not be able to link up with the lander until its orbit has been adjusted -- a feat that should be achieved by Jan. 3.

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Times staff writer Thomas H. Maugh II reported from Los Angeles and special correspondent Janet Stobart from London.