The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

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.