Tag Archive | Colin Pillinger

11 years on – Beagle 2 has landed!

Jan16

Earlier this week came the news that a joint NASA and UK Space Agency and Leicester University announcement about Beagle 2, the British-led Mars probe, would be made on Friday. I have been twitching all week—hoping so hard that the news would be good. And it is!

At last—Beagle 2 has been found! Such great news, courtesy of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which sends back images of the planet’s surface from a height of between 250 and 316 km above Mars.

Beagle 2 on the Martian surface. Photo by Hirise / NASA / Leicester University

Beagle 2 on the Martian surface. Photo by HiRISE / NASA / Leicester University

The MRO scientists have been searching for it for years, and at long last they have found Beagle 2 at its Christmas Day 2003 landing spot at Isisdis Planitia. No message was ever received from the probe, and so it was assumed that it had crashed or somehow been destroyed or rendered unable to send back data. Its fate remained unknown.

Now we can see that Beagle 2 landed intact, and due to some of the solar panel-bearing ‘petals’ failing to unfold, it could not generate the energy needed to send back data.

Beagle 2 on Mars.

Beagle 2 and landing equipment on Mars.

The lead scientist, Professor Colin Pillinger, sadly did not live to see this great day. He died last May, but is immortalised at a topographic feature on the surface of Mars: Pillinger Point.

Professor Colin Pillinger and a model of Beagle 2.

Professor Colin Pillinger and a life-size model of Beagle 2.

I wonder if the landing spot of Beagle 2 will be named after its most recent arrival?

(I should add that I bear no truck with talk of the Beagle 2 mission being a heroic failure. It was an incredibly difficult mission achieved on a miniscule budget, and it should be remembered how challenging a successful landing on Mars is—the success rate is 51%. So to have got so close to achieving the mission goals is to be celebrated. And as Prof. Pillinger himself said, in that wonderful, warm West Country accent of his—there are no failures, just experiences providing valuable data from which to learn and progress.)

Pillinger Point

Jul1
Pillinger Point, overlooking Endeavour Crater, Mars.

Pillinger Point, overlooking Endeavour Crater, Mars.

I look at various NASA websites regularly, and one set of missions on which I’m particularly keen are those currently operating on Mars. Of the two indomitable Mars Exploration Rovers, launched in June and July 2003, and both landed in January 2004, and only supposed to have a mission life of 90 sols (a sol is a Martian day, just a tad longer than ours at 24 hours and 39 minutes), Opportunity is still going. And then of course there’s the amazing Curiosity rover, launched in November 2011 and landed on Mars in August 2012. I got up very early to watch the landing live on the NASA webstream, and it was so exciting, learning that it had landed successfully after the complex landing procedure that involved the never-before used sky crane. My heart was in my mouth for a goodly while—but I bet that was nothing compared to what the project scientists were experiencing. I have also taken part in the citizen science project to classify (tag) images sent back to earth by Opportunity and its now sadly non-operational partner, Spirit.

I think part of the reason I am fascinated by Mars is that it is a desert planet, and I love deserts. Many of the photos in the Tag Mars citizen science project show a beautiful, desolate landscape, though occasionally you can see a dust devil caught as it passed by, or see the ripples of sand cut through by the rovers’ tracks. They could easily be the deserts in which I have worked in the Middle East. So familiar, and yet so other-worldly.

I checked recently on the progress of Curiosity and saw on 24 June it had taken a photo from a spot named Pillinger Point, overlooking Endeavour Crater. The brief text mentioned it was named after Professor Colin Pillinger, who died in May this year.

Professor Colin Pillinger.

Professor Colin Pillinger (9 May 1943—7 May 2014).

Colin Pillinger was a British planetary scientist and one of the driving forces behind the Beagle 2 mission to Mars. Sadly that mission was not a success. Like Spirit, it too was launched in June 2003, but although it was deployed from the ‘mother ship’ for landing on Christmas Day 2003, communication was lost, and with it, the mission. I remember seeing footage of Professor Pillinger announcing that Beagle 2 was lost, and how absolutely destroyed he seemed. All those years of hard work, all that hope, all that potential for science, lost in a few moments.

Today there is a lovely piece on the BBC website about this photo and the naming of a topographic feature on Mars after Prof. Pillinger. It is written by Steve Squyres of NASA, who worked on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and became a good friend of Prof. Pillinger’s. It’s a very touching tribute.

(Ahoy there mateys: I love too that Beagle 2 was named after the vessel, HMS Beagle, on which Charles Darwin conducted his historic and world-changing research; Endeavour Crater is named after the bark, HMS Endeavour, on which Captain Cook undertook his voyage of discovery to the southern hemisphere.)