Anxious scientists now believe that their best chance of getting in touch with Beagle 2 -- the little British spacecraft so far stubbornly silent on the surface of Mars -- is on Sunday, when its mothership passes overhead.
Right now, the European Space Agency's Mars Express is in a huge elliptical orbit around the red planet. Its engines will fire for three minutes today and the craft should slip into a polar orbit, passing regularly over the Beagle.
"We haven't yet played all our cards," said David Southwood, the space agency's director of science.
"With Mars Express we will be using a system that we have fully tested and understand. At the moment, I am frustrated rather than concerned," he said.
Beagle, the lander designed to search for signs of life on Mars, reached the planet on Christmas Day after a 400-million-km journey, equipped with a transmitter about as powerful as a mobile phone.
Since then -- and assuming it landed in one piece -- it may have been fitfully trying to relay a message back to Earth via a NASA spacecraft, Mars Odyssey, perhaps mistiming its call on each overhead pass.
Colin Pillinger, the UK scientist who spent six years and raised ?50 million (US$88.7 million) to place Beagle on Mars, said: "We need to get Beagle 2 into a period when it can broadcast for a much longer period. This will happen around Jan. 4 after the spacecraft has experienced a sufficient number of communication failures to switch to automatic transmission mode."
Beagle was meant to be a pioneer and a scene stealer, but it will have to share the limelight. Sunday is the day the full-scale assault on Mars begins.
Mars Express itself carries a camera which will photograph the Martian landscape to a resolution of 2m -- small enough to spot Beagle's discarded parachute or the airbags that should have cushioned its fall -- and radar that can penetrate up to 5km below the Martian surface, to detect underground rivers, aquifers and permafrost.
And on Sunday, the first wave of a new American invasion begins. A Mars exploration rover called Spirit will go through the same violent tests that faced the Beagle. Spirit will slam into the Martian atmosphere at 19,000kph, slow to 1,600kph, and then open a parachute to slow it to 300kph, at about 100m above the ground. But Beagle weighed only 68kg, and was designed to carry on falling until it bounced to a halt.
Spirit weighs 827kg, prompting the American lander to fire retro-rockets to lower its descent speed to zero before it inflates its airbags and resumes its fall, hitting the ground at 50kph. The whole descent will take six minutes.
Unlike Beagle 2, which to save power arrived on Mars in silence, Spirit will talk to engineers back on Earth at each stage of its journey, transmitting a single tone every 10 seconds. Once on the ground, it will beep five times every 30 seconds, relaying its signals to Earth via an older NASA spacecraft called Mars Global Surveyor.
Then, three weeks later, Spirit's sister act Opportunity will make the same hazardous descent. Journalists have talked of a "race" to find life on Mars. In fact, Beagle is the only lander overtly designed to dig below the surface and "sniff" for the chemical signature of life on Mars.
But it can only search where it lands. Spirit and Opportunity are roving robot geologists, each about the size of a golf cart, with stereoscopic cameras at around human eye level, and robotic arms that could grind below the weathered surface of the Martian rocks.
Beagle should have landed in a basin just north of the Martian equator called Isidis Planitia. Spirit is heading for the Gusev crater, which might once have been a lake, but was certainly formed by an impact with an asteroid or comet. Opportunity will dive into the Meridani Planum, an area of mineral deposits possibly formed by water.
The data from all three landers, matched with findings from the Martian orbiters, could collectively answer huge questions about the history of the fourth rock from the sun. There have been 35 attempts on Mars since 1961, with two-thirds ending in failure.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was