There is a lot of misinformation being reported regarding the current Mars Missions and it seems to me that it behooves the editors to at least attempt to try to get it right.... For only when the public understands the “Big Picture” can we assess the fantastic accomplishment that the ESA has pulled off.

“The focus of the mission — as with two NASA landers scheduled to arrive next month — is to search for evidence of life”... AP Reports, which of course is pure bunk. Beagle 2 is not only the 1st probe since Viking to “search for evidence of life”, it is the only current mission to do so (The NASA Landers are primarily geological missions, and the Mars Express hopefully will tell us a lot about how much water is currently below the surface)

As has been pointed out here, and in other forums, AP may be the source of the statement “The $370 million mission aims to search for evidence of life on Mars.” which is a number the editors appear to have pulled out of their a$$e$.

But what bothers me most about the current reports are that they gloss over the shining accomplishment of the Mars Express Orbiter, which has so far been a total success, is currently in Martian Orbit, and was designed, built, and launched on a shoestring budget and in record time. It is everything “Better, Faster, and Cheaper” was supposed to be. There is so little reporting on Mars Express on the News Channels that a casual viewer is led to believe that the “British Mars Mission” has probably failed.

While I am not quite ready to write Beagle 2's eulogy quite yet, it is important to put the entire Mars Express Mission is proper context.

The Mars Express mission was conceived as an orbiter to recover some of the science lost when Mars 96 Failed. Mars Express was designed, built and launched for about half the cost (and half the time) of previous missions using existing off the shelf technology. However, a lander wasn't even a part of the original plan.

The idea for a lander was an afterthought. When the designers of Mars Express realized that there was enough room for a small lander, they sought ideas and awarded the lander to Pillinger's group (by some accounts, he had already independently thought of attaching a small lander to ME).

I submit that the lander itself was a remarkable accomplishment. Small, Cheap, and full of great experiments. Yet, it was so vastly underfunded that the designers scrimped on the most important part of the design, namely, the EDL.

But how important was/is Beagle 2 to the overall Mars Express mission?

In my mind, the Beagle 2 is not unlike Mars Pathfinder, Small and Sexy. Quite the showboat, yet when compared to it's 1997 partner MGS, Pathfinder was more style than substance. It was a "feel good" mission that returned pretty pictures of the Martian Surface that we splattered all over the media, Internet, and Television – but probably returned only a small fraction of the science that Global Surveyor has. Indeed, I submit that much of what we currently know about Mars has been provided by MGS and Mars Odyssey.

While the loss of Beagle 2 is a blow (if it ends up being lost) it is unfortunate that it, ( a mission that had only a very small chance of success) has received so much attention. It has, IMHO, distracted us from the fact that the ESA has pulled off quite a feat by designing, building, launching, and now, orbiting Mars Express quickly and cheaply. The data that we receive from the radar alone may be more important than anything Beagle might have done...

I'll give ya Kudos ESA, even if the media continues to only see failure.