Scientists begin anxious wait for Beagle to phone home from Mars

BEAGLE 2’s chief scientist said last night he was not giving up on finding the missing British Mars probe.

Professor Colin Pillinger said scientists were just beginning their search for the craft, which should have landed on the Red Planet early on Christmas Day.

Last night they failed to pick up a faint signal from Beagle 2 using the powerful radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire.

More contact attempts will be made using radio telescopes in different parts of the world and by listening for the probe’s call sign relayed by Nasa’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

Speaking at a news conference at the Open University’s London office today Prof Pillinger said: “If we can contact it we can pull this thing around.

“But it’s like sending somebody a love letter, and you know they got it and you’re waiting for a response.”

Beagle 2 is programmed to make 13 more attempts to call Mars Odyssey.

After that it will go into an auto-transmit mode, sending out an “SOS” signal at repeated intervals throughout daylight hours to anyone able to receive it.

Beagle 2, on a mission to search for signs of life on Mars, should have parachuted down to the planet’s surface at 2.54am yesterday.

It was supposed to send out a call sign in the form of a nine-note “tune” composed by members of the pop group Blur.

The signal should have been transmitted to earth by Mars Odyssey, which has been orbiting the planet since 2001, but the call sign never arrived.

Beagle 2’s mother ship, Mars Express, will not be ready to attempt any communication with the probe until January 4.

Meanwhile scientists are urgently trying to contact the craft, which may be experiencing communication problems or could have crashed or suffered a systems failure. Prof Pillinger said: “I don’t put probabilities on anything. We’re going to keep trying.

“We would have liked to have seen something from Jodrell Bank, but we’re not giving up quite yet.”

He said both the Mars Odyssey link and communications using Jodrell Bank were untested.

“You have to liken this to the early days of mobile phones,” he said. “We’ve got one mobile phone, one mobile phone mast and one satellite, and we have to match these things up.”

Radio telescopes should be able to detect a weak signal directly from Beagle 2’s transmitter. But that will only work when the transmitter is on.

One possibility is the internal clock which switches the transmitter on and off might be wrong.

Scientists are still unscrambling the signal data received from Jodrell Bank in case Beagle 2’s transmission was hidden within it.

Jodrell Bank was able to look for Beagle 2 for an 80-minute period from 10.20pm to 11.40pm last night when the right side of Mars was in sight and Beagle 2’s transmitter should have been on.

The Westerbork radio telescope array in Holland also tried to help but was hampered by interference.

A third telescope operated by Stanford University in California was due to join the search tomorrow night.

Prof Pillinger said ideally he also wanted another telescope listening on the other side of the world.

Odyssey will again be in position to relay Beagle 2’s call sign after 6pm tonight.

But scientists stressed that Odyssey was never designed to operate with Beagle 2.

Prof Pillinger said Beagle 2 may have landed off target, be transmitting at the wrong time, or have failed to hook up with Odyssey.

Worse scenarios were that the probe had crashed or died after failing to deploy its solar panels.

But Prof Pillinger added: “This is not a failure yet, and even if it is a failure, it’s not the end of the British space programme.”

He hinted that if Beagle 2 was written off he might be willing to start the whole project again.

“I don’t for an instant think there wouldn’t be volunteers willing to help,” he said.

Beagle 2, weighing less than 70 kilos and no bigger than a motorbike wheel, was set to be the first European spacecraft to land on another planet.

For 180 days it was to test soil, rock and air samples for signs of past or present life on Mars.

Beagle 2 should have landed on Isidis Planitia, a lowland basin where scientists believe there was once water, and possibly life.

If radio telescopes on Earth can pick up the probe’s signal, it would give mission controllers a better idea of its location.

Mars Odyssey’s antenna could then be directed more accurately towards Beagle 2 as the spacecraft flies over the landing site.

The 250ft Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank has recently been fitted with a highly sensitive receiver.

Scientists are confident it has the ability to detect the Beagle 2’s Morse-like carrier signal.