Beagle 2 Team Prepares for Red Planet Landing

Britain’s Beagle 2 -- the first of three Martian landers headed to the Red Planet -- was cruising silently in space Tuesday while earthbound engineers prepared for a complicated landing scheduled for Christmas Day in Britain, Christmas Eve in the U.S.

Beagle 2, named for the ship that carried Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s, successfully separated from the Mars Express probe Friday and is now headed for Mars at a speed of about 6 miles per second, distancing itself from Mars Express at a rate of about 1 foot per second.

The 73-pound lander is now scheduled to plunge into the thin Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph, before slowing its descent with a parachute and bouncing to a soft landing on inflatable gas bags this evening at 6:54 PST.

But researchers from the European Space Agency, which has overall control of the mission, will not know until at least two hours later whether the landing was successful. NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter will fly over Beagle 2’s landing site on the Isidis Planitia basin at 9:15 p.m., providing the first opportunity for a signal from the lander.

If the landing is successful, researchers on Earth will hear a nine-note tune written by the British rock group Blur, one of the sponsors of the mission.

The next opportunity will be 17 hours later, when the massive radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory outside London will be in line of sight to listen for a signal from the landing craft. A signal then will confirm not only that Beagle 2 landed successfully but that it survived its first night on Mars, where temperatures can fall to minus-125 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beagle 2 carries a suite of instruments that will dig into the soil of Isidis Planitia and analyze it for traces of organic molecules that are the signposts of life. NASA’s Viking landers of the 1970s performed similar tasks with more rudimentary instruments, but were unable to definitively confirm the presence or absence of life.

“It is 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. “It is looking for clues.”

Meanwhile, a mere six minutes after Beagle 2 is scheduled to land, Mars Express will fire its retro-rockets to enter orbit around Mars. From orbit, the craft will send back three-dimensional overhead pictures of the planet’s surface and scan for underground water with a powerful radar.

It will also relay signals from Beagle 2, but is not scheduled to make contact with the lander until Jan. 3.

Mars Express was launched June 2 aboard a Russian Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Planning for the mission began only six years ago, to take advantage of Mars’ closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years, a celestial alignment that brought the planet within 35 million miles of Earth.

Mars is now about 100 million miles away and Mars Express will have traveled about 300 million miles to get there.

Two U.S. rovers are right behind it, scheduled to land Jan. 3 and Jan. 24.