Fingers Crossed for Beagle

Adam_Trask writes "Never has a spacecraft been built so quickly, on so little money, and been sent on such a long journey fraught with so many dangers. Beagle 2 has been carried to the vicinity of Mars by the Mars Express mothership, and released successfully to go its own way for the final leg of the journey."

Comments

If you want to know more about Mars

[Gavin Scott]

Perhaps the best science book I've ever read is A Traveler's Guide to Mars. This book is full of the latest imagery from various mapping missions, and the author (well known planetary scientist William K. Hartmann) tells you, in clear enjoyable prose, basically everything we know about Mars and how it has been figured out. It turns out that Mars is way more interesting (and wet) than you probably expect. If you plan on following the Beagle 2 mission and the two NASA rovers that follow next month, then this is the book to have.

G.

Re:Xmas Presents

[JimPooley]

That would be 'Leicester, the Beagle has landed' - the whole thing is being controlled from the National Space Centre in Leicester, where you can actually go and watch the control centre in action.

Although actually it's going to announce itself by playing a tune by Blur, as well as using a Damien Hirst painting to calibrate the cameras.

Re:Beagle?

[SquareOfS]

Well, half right. It's named after the Beagle, which is the ship on which Charles Darwin was the naturalist, which visited (among other places) the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin formulated much of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

More news on ESA Mars efforts

[zzabur]

ESA is also planning long term Aurora programme for eventual manned mission to Mars.

Aurora roadmap:

• 2007 - an entry vehicle demonstrator mission to validate and demonstrate high-speed re-entry technology
• 2009 - ExoMars, an exobiology mission to send a rover to Mars in order to search for traces of life - past or present - and characterise the nature of the surface environment.
• 2011 / 2014 - Mars sample return, a split mission to bring back to Earth the first samples of Martian material
• 2014 - Human mission technologies demonstrator(s) to validate technologies for orbital assembly and docking, life support and human habitation
• 2018 - a technology precursor mission to demonstrate aerobraking/aerocapture, solar electric propulsion and soft landing (formerly envisaged as a smaller Arrow-class mission to be launched in 2010)
• 2024 - a human mission to the Moon to demonstrate key life support and habitation technologies, as well as aspects of crew performance and adaptation and in situ resources utilisation technologies
• 2026 - an automatic mission to Mars to test the main phases of a human mission to Mars
• 2030 / 2033 - a split mission that will culminate in the first human landing on Mars

More information: ESA or Spacedaily.