Beagle 2 still hasn’t phoned home from Mars mission

A GIANT radio telescope in California was continuing to hunt for a signal from Britain’s Beagle 2 Mars probe yesterday after the telescope at Jodrell Bank failed for the third time to make contact.

The 250ft Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire attempted to catch Beagle 2's faint signals the equivalent of picking up a mobile phone call from Mars but it was unsuccessful.

Then the super-sensitive 150ft dish radio telescope at Stanford University in California joined the hunt. 'The Dish', as Stanford's radio telescope is commonly known, is powerful enough to detect radio emissions from Beagle 2's central processor microchip.

Scientists were also planning to recruit a radio telescope in Australia, as using telescopes in different parts of the world increases the chances of detecting transmissions.

But the fact that the probe has failed to communicate with Nasa's Mars odyssey spacecraft, which is supposed to be relaying its weak signals to Earth, is a bad omen.

A chance for Odyssey to contact Beagle 2 during the Martian day, when the probe's transmitter should be fully powered up, arose for the first time yesterday morning.

The silence continued, even after controllers on Earth tried resetting Beagle 2's timer with a command signal sent via Odyssey; it was thought a clock error might have been causing Beagle 2 to be transmitting at the wrong times.

Professor Alan Wells, spokesman for the Beagle 2 control room at the British National Space Centre in Leicester said: "I think that means this particular scenario is much less probable. It's not good news. It's a setback."

But the Beagle 2 team still has a trump card to play Mars Express.

The probe's mother ship, now preparing to enter a polar orbit round Mars, has a 10-times better chance of communicating with Beagle 2 than Odyssey which was only a temporary measure and it should beon January 4.

Beagle 2's chief scientist, Professor Colin Pillinger, who conceived the idea of a British lander six years ago, said at a London news conference: "What we now reckon is our best chance of communication is to wait until Mars Express is available for use. Really and truly, we're waiting until January 4 for a really big attempt with Mars Express."