Article on Beagle 2 mission to Mars
Mars: Dead or Alive?
A miniaturized marvel of engineering aspires to rewrite the textbooks about life on the Red Planet
By Barry E. DiGregorio
Recent missions to Mars have focused on the search for water, past or present, as a surrogate for life itself. But now a British-led team is working to renew the search for life directly, fueled by doubts about the equipment that prompted NASA to declare Mars a dead world some 26 years ago.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/may03/mars.html