Mars orbiter finds long-lost British lander

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has rediscovered a “lost” British spacecraft that disappeared without a trace more than 11 years ago.

The discovery of the Beagle 2 lander, hailed by planetary scientists, solves a decade-old mystery as to the fate of this missing spacecraft – and may reveal what exactly led to its untimely demise.

Mark Sims of the University of Leicester, who served as the spacecraft’s mission manager, expressed “elation that we’ve found it.”

The U.K.-led Beagle 2 hitched a ride to the Red Planet with the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, with the goal of searching for signs of life on Mars, past or present.

This was an ambitious endeavor. By comparison, NASA’s twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which reached Mars just weeks after Beagle 2, were sent with a much simpler goal: to look for signs of water. Even the high-tech 2012 rover Curiosity went with a more modest goal: to find hints of habitable environments.

On Christmas Day 2003, around 2:51 a.m. in England, Beagle 2 entered the Martian atmosphere – and was never heard from again. The scientists waited for a signal from the spacecraft, but none came.

Other spacecraft scoured Beagle 2’s landing area in Isidis Planitia, an impact basin close to the equator, with no luck.

“It really is a needle-in-a-haystack job,” Sims said.

A few possible sightings were reported in the years since. But the Beagle 2 was small – around 73 pounds, compared to the Curiosity rover’s 1-ton weight – and hard to pick out on the surface. None of the orbiters seemed to have a powerful enough camera to conduct the search, until the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrived in 2006.

The orbiter’s HiRISE camera, with its roughly 30-centimeter-per-pixel scale, was roughly 10 times better than its peers. It has pinpointed the location of a host of other Martian spacecraft, and for good scientific and engineering reasons, said Richard Zurek, project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“These are known objects to us, and we can look at how they’re changed by being in the Mars environment,” said Zurek, who was previously project scientist for another long-missing (and still-lost) spacecraft, NASA’s 1998 Mars Polar Lander.

The spacecraft began to image the landing site in bits and pieces as it circled the planet, but there were few leads until Michael Croon, of Trier, Germany, who was once part of the Mars Express operations team, started looking through the HiRISE images himself. Croon spotted a strange little feature on the surface that did not look like a Martian rock, and sent the information along to his former colleagues. The scientists followed up with more images, including one in color.

Having multiple images was key, Zurek said – with only one, the scientists wouldn’t be able to say for sure whether it was real, or a flaw caused by a cosmic ray hitting the camera.

“When you get multiple (images), particularly from different viewing angles, you begin to get an idea of the shape of this object,” Zurek said, “which is really at the limit of your resolution otherwise.”

Two objects near the spacecraft matched where the parachute and rear cover would have landed. The evidence all lined up, Sims said.