Spacey Mission to Mars

On Christmas Day, Europe’s first planetary explorer is expected to touch down on Mars, pop open like a clamshell and belt out a catchy little tune by the British pop band Blur.

If the mission goes as planned, the British-made Beagle 2 lander will slowly extend its PAW -- a mechanical arm laden with instruments and sensors -- to begin probing the surface for signs of life as a dot painting by English avant-garde artist Damien Hirst helps calibrate the cameras.

Orbiting above the planet, the spacecraft that ferried Beagle 2 to Mars will be carrying a tiny canister of red paint supplied by fabled Italian sports car maker Ferrari. A “momentous meeting ... between two Red Planets: the planet Mars and Ferrari,” the company proclaimed in an announcement of its Mars project.

The race to find life on Mars begins in earnest this month, and leading the pack will be a capsule that is little-known in the U.S. but which has captured the heart and imagination of Europe.

It is being called the “hippest-ever venture to another planet.”

The European Space Agency, which is overseeing the project, is scheduled today to launch Mars Express, the spacecraft that will carry the disk-like Beagle 2 lander to the Red Planet. Six months after its liftoff from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Soyuz-Fregat rocket, it will send the Beagle 2 to the planet’s surface to sniff, dig and howl a British pop tune, all in the hopes of finding signs of life on Mars -- if there is life on Mars -- before the Americans.

U.S. and European probes are racing to reach Mars because by August the planet will be the closest to Earth in 17 years.

The U.S. has put forth its best scientific minds and multibillion-dollar coffers to field two Mars rovers, which are scheduled to launch Sunday and June 25.

Europe’s contender was cobbled together by a hodgepodge of countries, companies and individuals.

TAG McLaren, the famed British maker of Formula One racing cars, built the hardened composite casing for the Beagle. Hot-air balloon enthusiast Per Lindstrand from Oswestry, England, designed the lander’s parachute, and London-based Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research group, helped develop the instruments to look for life.

“It’s a remarkable lander, not so much for what it is but how it came to be,” said Robert Zubrin, president of the Colorado-based International Mars Society, which is dedicated to the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet.

The Beagle 2 faces some tough odds. The journey is arduous and fraught with perils. The United States and Russia have spent billions of dollars since the 1960s with a checkered record of success. Of the dozen missions launched to land on Mars, only three have been successful -- all by the U.S.

Moreover, it marks Europe’s first venture in planetary exploration -- one of the most challenging and costly endeavors in science.

But if successful, the payback could be enormous and could help burnish the continent’s faded status as a luminary of cutting-edge science.

“If they pull this off, it will be a great source of pride for the Europeans,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Pasadena-based Planetary Society.

The Europeans have taken a decidedly unconventional approach to the mission, building the spacecraft on a shoestring budget as they brought together colorful scientists from all corners of the world and found financial and promotional support from the most unusual places.

“Certainly the budget has been very tight for us, so we’ve had to use some imagination,” said Barrie Kirk, the Beagle 2 project manager also known as Captain Kirk to his colleagues.

Beagle 2 is the brainchild of a scruffy, bespectacled English space chemist with Elvis sideburns and long hair who dreams about finding life on Mars in between feeding cows on his farm outside London.

Colin T. Pillinger, who first worked for NASA examining lunar rocks more than 30 years ago, had been on a Martian quest for years. It was an often-frustrating journey dotted with tantalizing but never conclusive findings, such as the announcement in 1996 that U.S. scientists had discovered possible traces of fossilized bacteria on a Martian meteorite.

When the European Space Agency announced in 1997 that it was sending a spacecraft to orbit Mars, Pillinger asked: Why not go one more step and send a lander to explore the planet’s surface? He was confident he could create a lander to “cadge a lift” on the ESA project. Only a lander could truly find evidence of life, he said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you find evidence on a meteorite because you can’t say for certain it was indigenous to Mars,” said Pillinger, who heads the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at the Open University near London. “You have to take a lander. Without a lander you can’t be 100% certain.”

After getting a tentative go-ahead from ESA, Pillinger began calling his friends and colleagues to see if they were interested in helping him develop the lander. The motley group resembled “country pub drinkers” more than cutting-edge scientists, Pillinger said.

They basically were “Mars-lighting,” as Pillinger likes to call the work that the scientists did after-hours, often for free.

“He put this together on a shoestring,” said Zubrin of the Mars Society.

Pillinger, in a telephone interview from his Cambridgeshire farm, was coy about the cost of the spacecraft, saying he didn’t want to give away any information that could help a competitor underbid him in future space projects.

His colleague Kirk, who works for the European aerospace firm Astrium that assembled the Beagle 2, was more forthcoming but acknowledged he has difficulty trying to figure out the cost because more than 100 companies contributed labor and parts.

Still, some space analysts believe the lander probably cost about $40 million, and that the orbiter and launch will cost about $175 million more, a far cry from the approximately $800 million that NASA expects to spend on its two Mars missions.

Pillinger named the lander after the 19th century British ship Beagle, which carried Charles Darwin as he formulated his pioneering theory on evolution.

Money was so tight in the beginning that Pillinger considered placing sponsorship stickers on the lander much like those on NASCAR race cars. A large chocolate company reportedly signed up.

Then in 1999, things began to look up when the pop band Blur decided it wanted to lend a hand.

The group, whose albums include “Modern Life is Rubbish” and “Parklife,” is not widely known in the U.S. but is very popular in the U.K., where it was once dubbed the “King of British Pop.” The inspiration for collaborating on the Beagle 2 apparently was a result of a volatile mix of alcohol and national pride, not surprising for a band that drew some notoriety for its members’ drinking excesses.

“It all started very late one night on a tour in America,” Blur drummer Dave Rowntree told the British paper the Guardian last week. He described how they kept running into fellow Englishmen during a tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“We were surprised by how many people were English, and that you needed to go to America to be a space scientist if you were English,” Rowntree said. “It got later and later and we decided we were going to start a British space program.”

Once back in Britain, Blur discovered Pillinger’s Mars program already existed. They pledged to help.

“What we had to bring was our celebrity badgering power,” Rowntree told the Guardian.

Eventually, Blur agreed to write a nine-note composition that could be used to check the Beagle’s communication link. The composition, which sounds like a cell phone ring with a tune similar to theme music from the British TV show “Dr. Who,” will play each time Beagle 2 radios home.

Support for the Beagle 2 grew rapidly, including a wealth of such high-profile people as Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair. That translated into increased donations from private benefactors, whom Pillinger declines to name.

The publicity also inspired Damien Hirst, a London avant-garde artist well-known for his paintings of colorful dots, to offer to create a miniature panel of dots for the Beagle 2. The lander’s cameras will use the colored dots to calibrate their lenses shortly after landing on Mars.

“At art school we were encouraged to break boundaries, and very quickly we were looking beyond the studio as a place for artistic creativity ... but Mars?” Hirst said. “Not in my wildest dreams would I have thought about making artwork that would actually travel to the Red Planet.”

Ferrari fans don’t quite know what to make of the red paint heading to the planet aboard Mars Express. The company has boasted that its sample of “Rosso Corsa” paint will give the exotic car maker the ultimate bragging rights -- the fastest car paint in the known universe, reaching 11,000 mph.

While it was not clear what scientific purpose the paint will serve, Ferrari said it had to undergo “rigorous” laboratory tests in the Netherlands and has been “space-qualified” for the trip.

“It’s brilliant,” said Marco A. Caceras, a senior space analyst for the U.S. research firm Teal Group Inc. “Europeans are struggling to fund many of their science programs, and so they came up with alternative means to financing the mission. Now they’re developing an underground cult.”

Help has also come from other unusual sources. T.C. Ng, a dentist in Hong Kong, designed the grinder that will dig under the Mars surface. He was visiting London when an acquaintance told him about the project and its problems in finding a suitable drill.

The drill will be part of a collection of instruments that will search for underground water and other evidence that could point to life on Mars.

If Beagle 2 does find evidence of life, past or present, Britain and ESA could claim one of the biggest discoveries of all time. That would be a source of great pride for Europe.

“It’s about time,” Zubrin said. “Europe used to be a continent that led world science, but it changed from a place where accomplishments were described in newspapers to accomplishments being described in museums.”

For members of Blur, it would certainly be a crowning achievement, easily surpassing the success of their 1997 hit known to most people as “The Whoo-Hoo Song.”

The group, however, is a little worried about how their new Mars tune might be received.

“How do you know what sounds like a friendly, warm greeting and what sounds like a declaration of war?” Rowntree asked an MTV audience last year.

Still, he is optimistic. “Martian bacteria love Britpop.”