Europe’s Mars Express orbiter successfully ejected its Beagle-2 surface probe today, clearing the way for a Christmas Day landing of Beagle-2 and the insertion of Mars Express into orbit around the red planet. Both probes will search for signs of present or past life on Mars.
December 18th, 2003
Storms threaten Beagle landing The Comet
Severe storms on Mars could threaten the success of Beagle 2 landing on the Red Planet on Christmas Day. Beagle 2, built and designed at EADS Astrium in Stevenage, will begin the most crucial part of its journey to the Red Planet when it leaves its mother ship Mars Express tomorrow morning (Friday). It will then hurtle towards Mars at 21,000kph and be monitored on the final five days of its journey by scientists and technicians at the National Space Centre (NSC) in Leicester.
December 17th, 2003
Speedera to Stream European Space Agency’s Mars Express Christmas Landing Business Wire
Speedera Networks, a leading global provider of on-demand distributed application and content delivery services, and Capcave, an Internet systems integrator based in the Netherlands, today announced that the two organizations are working directly with the European Space Agency (ESA) to provide live streaming of the Mars Express probe scheduled to arrive on Mars at Christmas. “Mars Express has been designed to perform a thorough exploration of the Red Planet, not only searching for water but daring to search for life itself,” said Fulvio Drigani, ESA’s portal manager. “The Web site is key to bringing this ambitious project home to the viewers on Earth. Since we expect record traffic to our site, after a rigorous examination ESA has selected Speedera and Capcave to stream this historic event.”
December 17th, 2003
Christmas Day Mars Landing
It’s wintertime in the northern hemisphere of Mars, and a flying saucer is about to land. Back on Earth where it comes from, the craft is known as the Beagle 2, sent to Mars by the European Space Agency in search of life. More accurately, the Beagle 2 will be looking for chemical traces of life–telltale signs that life once existed, or perhaps, exists right now on the red planet. Touchdown is scheduled for Christmas Day 2003. The Beagle 2 will precede two NASA rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, slated to land in January.
December 17th, 2003
Point and shoot
Any football or rugby fan knows that when a player kicks the ball, there is no longer anything they can do to influence its path. The player must trust to their own skill for the ball to reach its intended destination. What has all this to do with Mars Express? Three days from now, on 19 December 2003, Mars Express must, like an expert rugby player,
December 17th, 2003
Martian landscape in an urban setting Scotsman.com
Calum Stirling stands in front of his three-storey-high image of Mars celebrating the Beagle 2
December 16th, 2003
Mars Express Positioned for Beagle 2 Deployment
Ground controllers of Europe’s Mars Express satellite on Dec. 16 successfully completed a precision-pointing maneuver to prepare the satellite for a planned Dec. 19 ejection of its small Beagle-2 lander, the mission’s flight director said. Michael McKay, flight operations director at the European Space Agency’s Esoc space operations center in Darmstadt, Germany, said Mars Express was rotated and its engines briefly fired to increase the satellite’s speed as it approaches Mars as part of the maneuver.
December 15th, 2003
Christmas on Mars: be there with ESA
Launched on 2 June 2003, after a six-month cruise at an average speed of about 10 kilometres per second and covering a distance of about 400 million kilometres, ESA’s Mars Express will arrive at Mars on Christmas Day. After a very complicated and challenging series of operations during the night of 24/25 December 2003, the probe will be injected into an elliptical orbit near the poles of the Red Planet, while the Beagle 2 lander
December 14th, 2003
Inside Mission Control (UK), preparing for Christmas Day landing on Mars The Independent
An industrial estate in Leicester is an unlikely home for Britain’s first ever mission into space, let alone the base for a team of scientists who could be the first people to find life on Mars. But in a small complex of buildings next to the council vehicle depot, the British National Space Centre, as it is grandly named, is the command centre for the European Space Agency’s first attempt to explore the surface of another planet. It is where a team will direct Beagle 2, a tiny, shell-shaped, British-built lander, which could find the first proof that alien life exists.
December 12th, 2003
Linux set for Mars landing vnunet.com
The control centre is ready and a big Christmas celebration is expected when, or if, the UK’s most ambitious scientific project, the Beagle 2 Mars Lander, makes landfall on Christmas Day. In true British low-budget fashion, a single Linux-based workstation at the Lander Operations Control Centre (LOCC) is being used to send commands and receive vital data from Beagle 2.