No Signal From Beagle

[taylormemer]

PARIS -- A super-sensitive British radio telescope failed to pick up a signal from the Beagle-2 Mars lander tonight, deepening fears that the robot designed to look for life may have surrendered its own before setting to work.

Ground teams will make another attempt Friday at picking up Beagle-2 signals at 1:15 p.m. EST (1815 GMT) when NASA's Odyssey satellite orbiting Mars overflies what is thought to be Beagle-2's landing zone.

A first pass by Odyssey early Thursday morning also came up with no Beagle-2 signals.

Beagle-2 managers had brushed off the first Odyssey disappointment as relatively inconsequential. The satellite, they said, may simply have missed Beagle-2 during its 20-minute overflight, or the lander's transmit antenna may have been pointed away from Odyssey.

But tonight's failure of the 76-meter-diameter Lovell Telescope at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory to capture a Beagle-2 signal is another matter.

"I wasn't too worried about the missed link with Odyssey, but it starts getting serious if Jodrell Bank cannot get a signal either," said one mission nanager. "But you never want to give up hope."

Beagle-2 is thought to have entered Mars' atmosphere shortly before 10 p.m. EST Wednesday (0300 GMT Thursday).

It was designed to deploy a series of parachutes, jettison its heat shield and then inflate several air bags before bouncing to a stop on an area near Mars' equator. The air bags would then be cut off, freeing Beagle-2 to flip itself open, pocket-watch style, and send a signal to Odyssey.

Flight managers of Europe's Mars Express satellite, which successfully entered Mars orbit today after releasing Beagle-2 on Dec. 19, said they had narrowed Beagle-2's likely landing area to an ellipse just 30 kilometers wide and 5 kilometers long in an area called Isidis Planita.

Beagle-2 would have only a few hours to deploy its solar arrays and pick up badly needed power for its batteries before settling in for a frigid Martian night. Sunrise on Mars today was at 8 p.m. GMT.

Beagle-2 program designer Colin Pillinger, of Britain's Open University, had repeatedly said the signal from Beagle-2 that it had survived the night with its batteries functioning would be the first proof that the lander would embark on its mission.

Jodrell Bank's Lovell Telescope had been specially fitted with filters to reduce the noise from terrestrial sources, the better to concentrate on a signal from Beagle-2's miniscule 5-watt transmitter, a simple beep-beep sound that has been described as similar to Morse code.

"We're just basically waiting on a phone call," Beagle-2 project spokesman Peter Barratt said in a telephone interview, referring to word from the Lovell Telescope's operators that they had picked up Beagle-2 transmissions.
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Thhis sucks nuts for money, people who work on these projects spend enormous amounts of time on them, and then It all goes to waste, I just hope they recieve a signal.