Interesting, Richard C. Hoagland (who has lots of tinfoil hat comments about Mars space missions) actually took off his tinfoil hat and said something on the Coast to Coast AM radio show last night that makes considerable sense: Beagle 2 was essentially a very cheaply-developed component of the Mars Express spacecraft that was essentially added to the spacecraft almost literally at the last moment of the design of Mars Express. Because it was so cheaply developed, they never had the time to test all the components of the landing system, and if any one part of the landing system failed the whole Beagle 2 lander would have crash-landed on the surface of Mars in a couple of thousand pieces. Now, if the two NASA landers that will land on Mars on 3 January 2004 and 24 January 2004 failed to function, that would be a very different story indeed.
Anyway, the most important part of Mars Express--the orbiter with its state-of-the-art sensors--is functioning correctly and is now undergoing a slow retrobraking process using its onboard manuevering thrusters to adjust its orbit from its currently highly-elliptical path and also move it to a near-polar orbit. That should be completed by the end of January 2004, in which time the sensors on Mars Express will its its high-resolution camera (including stereoscopic views), infrared camera, and imaging radar to carefully look at every detail of Mars' surface--especially looking for water.