Day 3: Still No Signal From Mars Probe

Britain’s Beagle 2 Mars lander remained silent for a third day Saturday, and scientists believe that their best hope for receiving a signal is the spacecraft’s mother ship.

Mars Express, Beagle 2’s mother ship produced by the European Space Agency, entered orbit around the Red Planet on Christmas Eve, about the same time that Beagle was scheduled to land on the surface. Controllers have to make a complicated series of maneuvers before it will be in position to contact the lander.

“We haven’t yet played all our cards,” said David Southwood, ESA’s director of science. “The baby, we believe, is down on the surface, and the mother is very anxious to get in touch.”

Mission planners have been using daily passes of NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter over Isidis Planitia, Beagle’s Martian landing site, to try to contact the probe. British authorities reached an agreement with NASA for use of Odyssey after Mars Express was launched, so the two communications systems have never been tested together, lead scientist Colin Pillinger said.

The team has already used Odyssey to send a series of commands to Beagle, ordering it to reset its internal clock and to open its pocket-watch-like pod and extend its antenna -- in case one or more of those operations failed after the landing. None of the commands produced a response, however.

Saturday, European officials asked NASA engineers to double-check Odyssey to make sure it is functioning correctly. The orbiter’s communication system was temporarily shut down by a massive solar flare in October.

Mars Odyssey will continue to attempt to contact Beagle on its daily flyovers for at least 12 more days.

The team also has been listening for a signal from Beagle with the 250-foot Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire, England, and, more recently, with a smaller radio telescope at Stanford University in California. The telescopes can detect a signal from Beagle, but are not equipped to radio commands to the lander.

Engineers are not “writing off” Beagle, Southwood said, “and I don’t think anyone should. We’re hanging in there.”

Beagle 2 is the first of three landers scheduled to reach Mars within the next month. NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity are to land Jan. 3 and Jan. 24, respectively.

The three probes are part of an intensive effort to determine whether life ever existed on Mars.