Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

The evidence of water, in the form of ice, makes it yet more important that we refuse to give up and dispatch Beagles 3, 4 and 5 to the Red Planet to resume the search.

We should not hold our breath for intelligent Martian life. Anything we find there will be extremely primitive, hardy microorganisms that can cope with extreme cold and harmful ultraviolet rays. These can live under the most unlikely of conditions: the Apollo moon landings turned up microorganisms carried years before as passengers on an unmanned probe.

Martian life could be found in the form of fossils that died out long ago. Or it could survive in certain suitable zones. The search will be a little like opening a window on the Earth billions of years ago.

There are times when science is more like hearing a Beethoven quartet than poring over reams of numbers. Yesterday was one of those occasions.

To look at the pictures from Mars Express’s high-resolution stereo camera was to see something so supremely beautiful that I had to remind myself it was science, not art. These images would not have looked out of place at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.

Yet they tell us so much. There can be little doubt that the vast channel of Reull Vallis was carved by flowing water. It has water deposition and erosion: there is no way it could be anything else. When we look at Valles Marineris, it is as if we are gazing on the canyons and mesas that are so familiar to us from the American South West. It is a landscape of desolation and grandeur, but one that might possibly have harboured life.

This voyage of discovery encompasses so many great aspects of human endeavour. Important scientific advances are being made. But it is also advancing the achievement of the human race.

On 27 January 2004 Professor Colin Pillinger, the chief scientist of Beagle 2, was interviewed in The Times. When the loss of Beagle 2 was described as a heroic failure, he said:

“I don’t want to be a heroic failure. We would still like to be a heroic success, and we’ve done enough – if we don’t find it this time – to merit a second chance.”

Mars Express had found direct evidence of water on Mars. When he was asked about it he said:

“None of us thought there wasn’t water on Mars. I’ve seen it in my own Martian meteorites. But this is not a discovery of water. It was a very elegant demonstration of it.”

Professor Pillinger became interested in space years before Sputnik went into orbit in 1957, his mind catapulted starwards by the BBC radio programme Journey into Space.

Professor Pillinger compared the ESA and NASA missions:

Sending up two probes at once doubled NASA’s chances of hitting Mars at the closest it will come to Earth for 60,000 years, but Spirit was a better bet than Beagle even if it had been flying solo. While it had 24 air cushions and retro rockets to break its fall, Beagle had just the two airbags. Pillinger points out that Mars Express, the European spacecraft on which Beagle hitched a ride, could not have carried cargo anything as heavy as that so blame the lightweight European space programme.

But if only the dream had come true! The great future that lies beyond Beagle is more glorious than anything the American Rovers can aspire to. While NASA is merely looking for water, a precondition for life, Pillinger sought life itself.

He explained to me how the origins of his quest lay in the 1976Viking mission to the planet, which concluded that there was no life there. NASA turned its back on Mars and scooted off to explore the rest of the universe. But Viking later provided chemists with evidence that some meteorites that had been found in the Antarctic were Martian. It was while Pillinger and other scientists were examining their gas content to see if it matched the Martian atmosphere that they found, to their immense surprise, that there were traces of carbonates in them – evidence of life. Controversial at first, this finding was gradually accepted, the only remaining doubt being the worry that the samples could have been contaminated. It was to banish this doubt that Beagle was sent to conduct the same geochemical experiments on Mars to find the chemical fossils of extraterrestrials.

Had things gone differently, by the middle of next month Pillinger might well have been able to announce that he had found the first proof of extraterrestal life.

NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter went into orbit around Mars during 2001, then in 2003 NASA launched another Mars exploration project called MER (Mars Exploration Rover). On 10 June and 7 July 2003 they launched spacecraft toward Mars, each spacecraft carrying a Mars Exploration Rover. Like the ESA Mars Express mission, the rovers were in search of answers about the history of water on Mars and were scheduled to land on 3 January and 24 January PST (4 January and 25 January UTC) .

The first rover landed on 4 January 2004. Called Spirit by NASA, it was a six-wheeled vehicle about the size of a golf cart and was equipped to play the role of a geological explorer .

Spirit immediately transmitted a range of black and white images, including a sweeping panoramic of the Martian landscape, as well as a bird’s-eye view of the rover with its solar panels fully deployed .

Mission science manager John Callas said:

“This just keeps getting better and better. The pictures are fantastic.”

The total cost of the MER project was £545 million .

When NASA’s first Mars Exploration rover landed on Mars, Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent of The Times reported:

NASA scientists controlling the Spirit rover, which landed on Mars on Sunday, have chosen its first destination: a 10-metre-wide (30ft) crater they have nicknamed “Sleepy Hollow”.

The circular depression, which can be seen clearly in panoramic pictures sent to Earth yesterday, has been singled out as the best place for Spirit to begin its search for evidence that Mars was once wet and habitable. The rover is likely to set off for the crater, named after an American horror story, as soon as it leaves its landing module early next week.

Steve Squyres, the mission’s chief scientist, said the images suggested that a meteor strike had probably created the crater. The impact is likely to have cut through layers of rock, excavating the planetary surface for the rover to explore.

“The science so far has been extremely focused on where to go after the egress,” Dr Squyres said. “It’s a circular depression, 30ft in diameter and about 40ft to 50ft away from the rover.

“It’s a hole in the ground, a window into the interior of Mars. It may have been an impact crater, largely filled with dust. You can see the rock is exposed on the far side.

“It’s a very exciting feature for us. It’s probably where we will go unless we see something better.

“The feature now has a name. We have all not been getting as much sleep as we’d like, so this feature is now named Sleepy Hollow.”

Spirit, which has a daily range of 20m (65ft), will use its rock abrasion tool to grind down the surface of boulders, before testing them with scientific instruments. It aims to establish whether Mars holds sedimentary rocks, which would offer evidence that the planet once flowed with water – a prerequisite for life.

Scientists believe that Gusev Crater, the region in which Spirit landed, might have held an ancient lake, making it a promising site for finding sediments.

Dr Squyres said yesterday that tests on four of the craft’s six key instruments had shown that they had survived Spirit’s hard landing on Mars, in which it bounced up to 14 times before coming to a halt.

His team was relieved that the sensitive Mossbauer spectrometer, which identifies iron isotopes in rocks, was working. Tests on the remaining instruments will begin today. Scientists were hoping last night to receive a colour high-resolution panoramic picture from the rover, which would be by far the best image of Mars ever captured.