Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Found! Beagle 2 on Mars

Episode Date: February 17, 2015

The Beagle 2 Mars lander disappeared after it separated from the Mars Express orbiter on Christmas Day, 2003. Eleven years later, it has been found, partially-deployed on the Martian surface. Longtime Beagle 2 mission leader Mark Sims tells the story.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Found! Beagle 2 on Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It disappeared on Christmas Day, 2003. Eleven years later, and after some of its creators had passed away, the UK-led European Beagle 2 lander has been found. We'll get the amazing story from mission lead Mark Sims in England. Speaking of Europe, everybody's going to be talking about the latest images of Comet 67P

taken from just four miles away by the Rosetta orbiter. And that everybody will include Emily Lakdawalla in a couple of minutes. We'll pay a visit to Bruce Betts as he teaches his live astronomy class. First, though, Bill Nye is back with his argument for putting continued operation of two great missions back in NASA's 2016 budget. Bill, we haven't had much of a chance to talk with you about the NASA budget that we covered last week with Casey Dreyer and Jason Callahan. Would you agree with them that overall it looks pretty good? Well, yeah, because it includes an increase for planetary science, still not up to our beloved 1.5 billion. By our, I mean the Planetary Society. Phase A for a mission to Europa,

phase A is a big deal at NASA. But along with that, it is suggested, proposed, included that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter budget and the Opportunity Rover budget be cut. In other words, the Opportunity Rover is driving around on Mars to this day, 11 years after it landed there. It's still working, like having a car drive for 130 years with a three-year warranty. Anyway, it's amazing. To turn that thing off, it's there and it's running. This is where we encourage somebody to expand the NASA budget just a little bit. And you'll hear words like cross-agency support. There's some funds floating around that might be accessed. But just, people floating around that might be accessed.

But just people, let's show some judgment. Come on. And the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is doing reconnaissance and it's orbiting. For crying out loud, let's keep it going. Don't turn it off. You know how hard it is to get those things on other worlds? My goodness, people, come on, keep with your investment. Yes, they're very well made and they're still working, which is a little bit surprised. And people in our culture trade their cars in every few years. But this is different. These are spacecraft orbiting other worlds. So let's expand the budget just a little. And this is something I think we'll continue to talk about now and then on the show and elsewhere at Planetary.org. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, back with us in his regular slot

to talk about whatever he wants to talk about, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Emily, just because we can't ignore it, I bet you'd like to say something about that latest flyby by Rosetta. Yeah, it was pretty cool because they had to back up to quite a distance away from the comet to get ready for this close six kilometer flyby. So first they took these amazing pictures

of a much more active comet than the last time they were out so far with these huge sprays of vents just going off in every direction, which were really dramatic to see before the weekend. And then this morning we get up and we see these absolutely incredible photos of layers and layers and boulders and outflows and all kinds of crazy features on the surface of the comet from the super close-up images. And the images are only going to get better because we're only looking at the nav cam photos. The OSIRIS science camera pictures will be so much sharper. It's going to be awesome. The resolution was so good on these images that I was imagining myself down on the surface and trying to gauge the scale of things. And it's the next best thing to gauge the scale of things.

And it's the next best thing to be in there. Absolutely. We are talking about experience on a human scale here. You couldn't see a person in the photo, but you could see, you know, an airplane in the photo. And you can really imagine yourself flying down these canyons. You also wrote about Cassini back in the ring plane. Yeah, I'm so excited about this. You know, I like photos of Saturn among its tilted rings as much as any other space fan. But what I really love most about the Cassini mission is the repeated flybys of these icy moons. Each one of them has its own unique personality. Cassini can only do

that when it's orbiting in the same plane that the rings and all the moons orbit, because otherwise it just doesn't fly by the moons often enough. So it kicked off a new equatorial orbital season with a flyby of Rhea, got two beautiful mosaics showing its cratered surface in lovely detail. And seeing into some areas near its north pole that Cassini has not been able to see before because spring has only recently come to the north pole and sunlit those areas for the first time. So we're still filling in gaps on the maps. It's really exciting to see this moon again. And it's also somewhat bittersweet because this is Cassini's very last close flyby of Rhea. It's all on the blog, her blog, Emily's blog at planetary.org. Thanks, Emily.

Thank you, Matt. Our senior editor, the Planetary Evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We're going to talk now about the discovery of Beagle 2 down on the surface of Mars. Stay with us. By my liberal count, only eight spacecraft had managed to land as intended on the surface of Mars, beginning with the partially successful Soviet Mars 3 mission almost 44 years ago.

Make that nine, spacecraft, because Beagle 2 has been found. In what is an amazing, though poignant, achievement, the little Mars lander was discovered intact last month. It is exactly where it is supposed to be, near the Martian equator. The discovery came too late for several of the mission's leaders, but Mark Sims is still here to celebrate. Mark is a professor in astrobiology and spacecraft instrumentation at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

He was part of the Beagle 2 effort from the start and led the investigation that followed its loss. He spoke to me a few days ago from his university office. Mark, thank you very much for joining us here on Planetary Radio. Pleasure to talk to you. Tell us what we now know about the fate of Beagle 2. Well, we know some of the fate of Beagle 2. Images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Hi-rise camera have shown what appears to be Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars. If it's not Beagle 2, it's the most peculiar piece of Martian geology ever seen,

in that we see a low-lying object, highly reflective, with the shape of Beagle 2, but not the full shape of Beagle 2, of Beagle 2, but not the full shape of Beagle 2 in that the image suggests that only partial deployment happened after landing. And that would explain why we never heard from Beagle 2 after the 19th of December 2003, when it was ejected from Mars Express, because the Bigger 2 had to fully open up all its solar panels to expose its radio antenna, which would then transmit the I'm on Mars signal back to Earth and enable us to start science operations.

Who can we thank for finding this ultimate needle in a haystack? We can thank a chap called Michael Kroon, who was previously part of the ESA Mars Express operations team, who, like many other individuals, has actually spent his spare time looking through images of Mars, looking for Beagle 2. Members of the Beagle 2 team have done this as well. Michael came across

two images which when he flipped between them showed a visible change. And it's fair to say that when Michael looked through the images individually he was not at all convinced he'd found anything. And in late last year, 2014 November, we started to pick up via the high-rise team the fact that Michael may have found something which was highly intriguing and then with help from Tim Parker at JPL who processed those images became clear we were looking at something which had all the right characteristics to be Beagle 2, almost the right shape, almost exactly the right size and in the right position to be the lander. And some other bits arrayed around it, right, which also helped to indicate that this was in fact your spacecraft. That's right, you know, you would expect very close by within a few hundred meters the parachute, the rear cover and its pilot chute.

Ideally, you'd obviously like to see the airbags which cushion Beagle 2's landing. There's certainly evidence of the parachute. There's better evidence of the rear cover and its attached pilot chute because if you flip between the two original images, you actually see something apparently move in that area on Mars, and the only thing we can think of is the pilot chute, which was anchored to the rear cover, is actually moving around in the Martian winds, producing this apparent shift in the position of a target object.

Wow, that makes this even more dramatic. Isn't there at least a touch of triumph in this, knowing that your spacecraft made it to the surface? There is a touch of triumph, yes, in that they sort of indicated the engineering of the entry, descent and landing system, though it's fair to say that we always realized Beagle 2 was a risk, because it was all single string. We didn't have the mass, the volume to actually put redundancy in any of the systems.

So it's vindication that that worked. It's vindication that the calculations for entry and descent were cracked, that Beagle 2 was ejected at the right angle off Mars Express, etc. It's also intense frustration because we got amazingly close. As Rob Manning of JPL said, we managed 99.9, perhaps 99% of the way there, and only at the last moment did we have a problem which would have stopped Beagle 2 transmitting from the surface of Mars. stop Beagle 2 transmitting from the surface of Mars. Yeah, it is still a pretty exclusive club of those teams that have managed to achieve a soft landing on the Red Planet. I still have to find it heartbreaking, as you obviously do, that such an amazingly inexpensive

yet also amazingly innovative mission came so close to returning data. Are there lessons in the Beagle 2 in the spacecraft and how you all accomplished this that really everybody else who wants to explore Mars and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system that we should be learning? There are and there aren't. I mean, Beagle 2 was a very unusual project in that there was an opportunity with mars express at that time a single opportunity for europe to go to mars single opportunity to land and we took this highly innovative approach now it's very fair to say that we learned a lot a lot of lessons doing it and we wouldn't design a lander the way we design Beagle 2 now. We probably wouldn't even build it under the extreme time constraints and financial constraints and schedule constraints

and integration constraints that we had. So, yes, it was a project of its time. It was an amazing project to be part of. It was a fantastic training activity for everybody. Everybody learned how to potentially build a Mars lander, which is being now applied in other missions like ESA's ExoMars rover, etc. But you wouldn't do it the same way again, and you certainly couldn't do it for the cost,

because Beagle 2 at the time was such a unique opportunity. A lot of the effort was given it nominal cost rather than cost with profit, if you like, from the various companies, because it's advertising you can't buy, essentially. And an indication of how inspiring an attempt like this is, that so many people worked on this for so little money. Wasn't the total budget about £66 million or maybe $100 million? Yeah, nobody actually knows the total cost in actual fact, because some of the work was done at cost, some was done for free,

but estimates, probably the best estimate is about £48 million to £50 million. But I don't think we'll ever know the ultimate cost because you know as i say some parts were given for free etc so maybe the total cost is much more than that maybe it's 60 to 80 million it was innovative it was inspiring it was inspiring not just to the people working on it but the people in the uk and Europe who wanted to land on Mars and explore Mars. And if you like, it changed whole people's careers, inspired people, young people to go into space. And from that point of view,

Beagle 2 was a success as well as the training aspects. And it was also, as we know now, success in that it made it down to the surface. It's just a great pity we didn't manage the final step And it was also, as we know now, success in that it made it down to the surface. It's just great pity we didn't manage the final step and at least get a picture from the surface of Mars, as well as some scientific data. That's Mark Sims, one of the creators of the Beagle 2 lander, just discovered on the surface of the Red Planet. We'll hear more from Mark in a minute.

This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio listeners. Bill Nye the Science Guy here. The Planetary Society's remarkable LightSail spacecraft is headed for space. We want you to come along. LightSail is a small spacecraft propelled by photons from the sun. The excitement is building as we count down to our launch in May. Follow every aspect of the mission at sail.planetary.org. Let's change the world.

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. You've got to see the orbital image of the tiny Beagle 2 lander sitting on the surface of Mars. We've got it on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. As the University of Leicester's Mark Sims told us before the break, it's hard to believe it could be anything else. We'll go back to Mark in a minute. First, though, a bit of trivia. Why did they call it Beagle 2? Was there a Beagle 1? Yes, but you have to look back to the 19th century to find it. The Beagle was the British ship that carried

Charles Darwin across the world, allowing him to make the observations that would lead to the origin of species, his masterwork that would change all of biology. The optimistic hope for Beagle 2 was that it would also contribute to a world-changing discovery, the discovery of life, or signs of past life, or just the right conditions for life somewhere other than Earth. The spacecraft's tiny body contained tools that were designed to do the job. Perhaps a spacecraft will never go there in this configuration again,

but still, you talk about how innovative it was. Talk about some of the instruments on Beagle 2, which are just fascinating. Yes, Beagle 2 was a very compact lander, and we were trying to do a lot of science in a very, very small volume. And consequently, what we were aiming to do was look for organics in the surface, look at the geochemistry, do the first attempt at in-situ radiometric dating, so a whole suite of instruments. Its main instrument was a gas analysis package provided from the Open University by Ian Wright

and Colin Pillinger. It essentially was a mass spectrometer-based package, which would have burnt carbon contained in the rocks into CO2 and measured that with a mass spectrometer. It also would have been able to detect argon, which would have enabled it to do in situ radiometric dating, along with information on the potassium content of the rock, so it's argon-potassium dating, from the X-ray spectrometer, which was part of the so-called PAW assembly.

Yes, a pun was intended in terms of bees and dogs. The PAW assembly had a number of instruments on board. It had two stereo cameras. It had a Cora grinder to extract a small core from a rock. It had a MOSBAR spectrometer. It had the X-ray spectrometer and also had a microscope. And then buried underneath the PAW was the MOL, which is a device for penetrating the ground and obtaining a subsurface sample.

And that technology is now being used on the InSight mission in 2016 to measure the heat flow in the upper layers of Mars' surface. It was highly innovative. It had to be small. The real problem with Beagle 2 is that the constraints of Mars Express meant we had zero redundancy. You wouldn't do it the same way again. All sorts of lessons were learned. People can ask the question, why was the radio antenna on the inside of the solar panels? The answer is that was the only place we could put it, given the constraints, mass and volume we were under.

We wouldn't want to have put it there, but that was where it fitted. So some of the design, if you like, was sub-optimum in terms of the requirements, both in terms of operation and perhaps in terms of science. You and so many others who were involved with this mission certainly haven't ended your work. Do you continue to develop techniques for discovering life on Mars and elsewhere, perhaps around the solar system? We certainly do, yes. Beagle 2 was very much a catalyst in the UK to get people into Mars research. It was the start, indirectly, of the UK's involvement in ESA's Aurora program, which will go to Mars with ExoMars.

in ESA's Aurora program, which will go to Mars with ExoMars. And people in the UK are developing all sorts of instruments, some of the seismometers for InSight in 2016, things like the Raman spectrometer to fly on ExoMars, looking for mineralogy and also carbon-containing compounds, cameras for ExoMars. It was the start of a whole process which spawned a whole series of developments. And there have been developments we've done in terms of looking for organics on Mars using very novel techniques like immunoassay,

essentially using biology, if you like, to detect biology. And hopefully some of those perhaps future techniques will fly in the distant future and perhaps on a future mission if funding allows. Seems to be a legacy to be proud of. Perhaps we can end with a bit of a tribute to your colleague in this mission, Professor Colin Pillinger from the Open University, who passed away just nine months ago. You have to wish that he had been able to share in this discovery. Yeah, somebody actually did say at the press conference,

we wonder whether Colin had put in a good word. That's why we'd found Beagle 2. Colin was very much the driving force behind Beagle 2. He was not, as we say, perhaps uncontroversial. He made some perhaps controversial comments in order to get Beagle 2 done. He made it happen. It was his project, both his project lead and project scientist. And we couldn't have done it without Colin. The sad thing is that two other colleagues were involved with Beagle 2. My immediate boss, Professor George Fraser, who was Principal

Investigator on the X-ray Spectrometer here at the University of Leicester, and Professor Dave Barnes, who was at Aberystwyth University in Wales, who planned all the robotics for Beagle 2, also sadly died last year. So it's three people who were intimately involved with Beagle 2 who will actually never know that we came so close to success, which I find very sad. Mark, I'm glad that you are still here to continue the work. Again, thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio, and congratulations on this discovery

and also having been part of a team that achieved the soft landing of a truly amazing spacecraft on Mars. Thank you very much. Mark Sims is professor in astrobiology and spacecraft instrumentation at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He served as the Beagle 2 mission manager and helped lead the ambitious and innovative effort right from the start. He also led the internal inquiry into Beagle 2 following its failure to communicate following its release from Mars Express. He continues,

as you heard, to develop ideas for life detection on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system. Up next, we'll visit with Bruce Betts. It'll be this week's edition of What's Up. Back with the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, it's Dr. Bruce Betts once again. And it is that periodic, very special thing that we do where we drop in at CSU, California State University, Dominguez Hills, on Bruce as he teaches his class. There are people watching us on live TV right now. They are. And if planetary radio listeners want to see how fabulous we look, you can always go to planetary.org slash Betts class and tune in for class too. But yes, here we are in my online

introductory planetary science and astronomy class, lecture two. I don't claim any better than a face for radio, but I'm very glad to be here with you on camera once again. Tell people, before you get into your lecture, what's up in the night sky? Venus and Mars are the key things to focus on this week or week or two. Venus and Mars low in the west shortly after sunset. Venus looking much, much brighter, the really bright star-like object. Mars nearby looking kind of reddish. And they will actually keep coming together closer and closer in the sky until February 21st.

They'll be less than half a degree apart. They'll also be joined by the moon, making for a lovely triple thingy on February 20th. Technical term. Yeah, I try to use technical terms, particularly with the class. You wouldn't want to mislead your students. Early evening, if you look to the complete opposite side of the sky, you will see another bright star-like object that is Jupiter and Saturn is coming up in the middle of the night over there in the east. All right, we move on to this week in space history. In 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. And then a bit more recently, 2009, the Dawn spacecraft flew by Mars on its way out to the asteroid belt where it then encountered Vesta. And now we're just a month away or so from it parking around Ceres, the largest asteroid.

And we talk on last week's show, as people hear this, but you TV people this week's show, to Mark Raymond, who's the director of that mission and the chief engineer about its ion engines. He was one of the people we visited with at JPL last week when we did our visit there for Icy Worlds Day. It's such a cool mission. Very cool. It Day. It's such a cool mission. Very cool. It is. It is. And the first ever to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies.

Quite an accomplishment. Yeah. On to random space fact. Now, you TV people, you don't get the full effect because you don't have the nice reverb or echo behind Bruce's voice. So use your imagination. I think I always go to the radio show. So Mars, Titan, and Earth walk into a bar. No, sorry. Mars, Titan, and Earth are the only places in the solar system

that are known to have hosted standing liquid lakes, liquid water lakes in the past for Mars. The present, all sorts of liquid water for Earth. And off on Titan, different stuff, methane, ethane, liquid lakes. Earth, the only planet or body in the solar system known to host liquid libations. At least on the surface. Yeah, as far as we know. Yeah, yeah.

All right, we move on to our weekly trivia contest. And I asked you, what are the names of the two stars in Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper, that point, so to speak, at Polaris, the North Star? And I'll talk about that in class in just a few minutes. What are the names of those pointer stars that get you to the North Star in the night sky? How'd we do, Matt? Great response. Once again this week, even though all we were offering was a Planetary Radio t-shirt, but you know, what a shirt. Yeah, what do you mean all we're offering? Stop dissing the Planetary Radio t-shirt. I love it. I love to wear it. You would too. And hopefully

Torsten Zimmer will, because I think he's won this week's contest. As always, randomly selected from all the people who wrote in. And Torsten, he often keeps us entertained. He sends us lots of very funny stuff that we read on the air. This time, he's basically just the winner. Although he did tell me about the Discordian Society. Have you ever heard of it? No.

Look it up. It's worth checking out. It's pretty amusing, actually. But Torsten, who lives in Germany, he said that the North Star, Polaris, can be located by an extending and imaginary line from, do I have to try and pronounce these? Yes, you do, because I don't know how to pronounce them. Merak and Dube. Exactly. Exactly? Exactly right?

Exactly. Dube, Merak, Ursa Major Alpha and Beta. Congratulations, Torsten. It's been a while. I think he's definitely won before, but it's been a good long while. We're going to get a T-shirt out to you, Torsten. I think we're ready to move on. So the next trivia contest, how many bathrooms or toilets are on the International Space Station?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get us your entry. When do they need to get those in by, Matt? First, my jaw is a slack. I had never thought of it. I just assumed that there was only one, but perhaps I've been wrong. Men, women, aliens, I guess everybody has their own. We can't talk about the aliens. No, that's right.

I forgot we're sworn to secrecy by NASA. Anyway, you've got until the 24th, Tuesday, the 24th, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And we're going to go back to we'll keep the shirt in there. You might still win a stylish, snazzy Planetary Radio t-shirt. But you can also get a nice account from those good people at itelescope.net, the worldwide network of telescopes for astronomers. Anybody can sign on to one of these if you have an account, and the 200 points is worth about $200 U.S.

And point those telescopes, take an image, take something great and send it to Bruce and me. We wish you luck. Cool prizes. Yeah. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the magical miracle of multiple microphones. Thank you, and good night. Microphones are my life.

He's the TV guy. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up, and sometimes at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Planetary Radio continues to grow, adding new radio stations to our network of affiliates, lots of new online listeners, too. I hope you'll tell friends and strangers about our little space show.

The great public radio station you're listening to would love to hear from you. You might also want to consider giving the station your support. And if you listen online, I hope you'll rate and review us. But most of all, thanks for listening. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the members of the Society. Josh Doyle wrote our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Clear skies.