Tiny Beagle lander still hasn't phoned home
BY JUSTIN RAY
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: December 27, 2003

While remaining steadfast in their belief that the Beagle 2 lander survived its journey to Mars, project officials said this morning that the best shot at hearing from the craft won't occur before January 4.

Multiple attempts to detect signals from the lander using NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft orbiting the planet and the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in England have been unsuccessful since Beagle's Christmas morning touchdown.

"Odyssey and Jodrell Bank were not our primary communications routes," Colin Pillinger, the Beagle 2 lead scientist, told reporters at a news conference today. "The difficulty with using Odyssey and Jodrell is we can only search for Beagle at the times which have already been predicted that Beagle is able to talk to the spacecraft or could be on-air so that the telescope could look for it."

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"We always knew this would be a very difficult wait, knowing that Beagle was down on the surface and that we couldn't use our regular communications system -- a communications system that has been planned all along. So Colin and his people put in place the alternatives that we have been trying -- the cooperation with the Americans to use the Mars Odyssey spacecraft as a communications link and using the big ground-based telescope, Jodrell Bank, in Cheshire, England. These are so-to-speak backups but they were there because we were aware that the media, and indeed everybody, would want to know as soon as possible how Beagle was.

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The radio telescope at Stanford University in the U.S. will be used starting tonight, adding more search time and greater sensitivity to hear Beagle 100 million miles away. And officials said that other radio telescopes around the world have expressed support in joining the hunt if needed.

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