Lost beagle on Mars?

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,1413,206~11851~1856076,00.html ^

[rs79bm]

SOMEHOW, "The Beagle has landed' just doesn't have the same ring as a certain, similar phrase coined in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and company first landed on the moon.

But the Mars lander dubbed the Beagle 2 was named by British scientists and engineers, who have a rather drier, less grand approach to space-exploration nomenclature than their American cousins. And the craft is named after English explorer and naturalist Charles Darwin's vessel, so there is a fine historical precedent at work.

As of Friday, there still had been no word or rather, no nine-tone song written by the Brit-rock group Blur, which actually helped finance the mission from the Beagle, and there are worries about its safety. The craft was to have landed Christmas Eve our time, and to have transmitted its dulcet tones signaling its safe arrival by now. But NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter couldn't find the Beagle on Christmas or on Friday as it flew over the broad basin called Isidis Planitia where the craft was to have landed. A Stanford radio telescope is still searching for Beagle this weekend.

It's not easy, looking for life on Mars. Two-thirds of the missions launched by Earthlings to the Red Planet have gone wrong over the years. Only one of six Russian attempts have made it and that craft was able to broadcast for all of 20 seconds before fading away. A Japanese mission headed for Mars orbit in recent weeks went awry. Most famously and most heartbreakingly for the world's leading experts on robotic space exploration, the folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, the 1999 Mars Polar Lander and its orbiter both failed. That led to a slowdown in the whole Mars exploration effort and cancellation of a landing planned for 2001.

But we agree with the engineers who say that the rough going should not make us give up on efforts to explore the planet most closely resembling our own in our solar system. Of course it's hard just getting spacecraft tens of millions of miles away; successfully negotiating a landing and scientific research on a remote world is naturally going to take some practice. From each mission, a total success or not, we learn much more for the efforts to come. The orbiter for the Beagle is still operating well, for instance, and has a scientific mission of its own.

And for the American space program, those efforts begin in earnest again Jan. 3 and 24, when two robotic rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are scheduled to land in separate Martian areas thought to be prime candidates for having been under water at some time in the distant past. Where there is water there may have been life and finding signs of life elsewhere in the universe is the ultimate prize in space exploration and in expanding human knowledge. Tang and other byproducts for use here on Earth are fine, too. But here on the verge of discoveries previous human generations could only have dreamed of, Americans and citizens of the world are participating in an unrivaled age of exploration.

[martian_22]

...Should have sub-contracted the Vogons...cheaper you know.

[Analyzing Inconsistencies]

The Europeans have collapsed under their own socialism... So much would be possible if only we could get beyond the monopolistic corruption that still pervades our bureaucratic governments’ SOCIALIST space programs. Related thread:
Did Astrium, an ESA-anointed monopolistic contractor, actually WANT its lean-budgeted Beagle 2 Mars mission to fail in order to secure greater funding for subsequent interplanetary missions funded by increasingly stimulated European taxpayers? Why won’t ESA and NASA simply offer COMPETITIVE PRIZES?