Prof. Hall over at the SpaceCraft blog has a nice article on the two Mars spacecraft that reached Mars during the past week: The Beagle II and the Spirit Rover. The Spirit appears to be functioning well, however the Beagle appears to be lost.
Beagle 2 is a 75-kg British-built lander, named after the famous ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, whose naturalist, Charles Darwin, was even more famous. The modern Beagle is the brainchild of Open University's Professor Colin Pillinger, and hitched a ride to Mars onboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express. A few days before arriving at Mars, the Beagle separated from Mars Express, using a spring-loaded separation mechanism that simultaneously gave the spacecraft a spin-stabilized angular velocity of about 14 RPM. The Beagle then followed its own path to a Mars landing, while Mars Express prepared to place itself into orbit about the Red Planet.Beagle was supposed to have descended and landed about 6 days after the release, using a combination of heat shield, parachute, tether and inflatable gas-bags. Sometime around midnight Christmas Eve, Beagle should have landed in the Isidis Planitia Basin, a site that "showed evidence of fluvial processing by large volumes of water." A couple of hours after landing, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter was to fly over the Beagle landing site and act as a communications relay between the lander and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. That was more than a week ago, and Beagle has not been detected (though you may find this satirical story to the contrary amusing). The ESA has begun to lower the Mars Express spacecraft's orbit to make it easier for it to communicate with the Beagle. I should note that by all accounts the Mars Express mission has performed flawlessly.
Meanwhile, NASA's two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were also on their way to Mars. These two lander/rovers were natural follow-on missions to 1997's Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover, a highly successful mission by any measure. The new rovers have been journeying to Mars for several months, and two virtual astrobots who journeyed with them were also blogging about their epic voyage.
On the first Saturday of the New Year, Spirit landed in the Gusev Crater and began transmitting images back to Earth. The rover has not yet begun to rove, but is expected to move out in a few days, traveling at a speed of several meters per day. Opportunity will make its landing on Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, hopefully as successfully as its earlier sibling.
Interesting stuff. Mars is still very hard to get to.
Posted by elkaim at January 5, 2004 5:41 PM