On Christmas Day 2003, a small British spacecraft was due to wake up on the surface of Mars and call home. The plan was that it would announce itself with a nine-note tune written by the band Blur. Radio telescopes at Jodrell Bank listened. The European Mars Express orbiter listened. Nothing came.
A very British space mission
Beagle 2 was the idea of Colin Pillinger, a planetary scientist at the Open University with a West Country accent and a gift for publicity. Named after HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin, it was designed to search for signs of past or present life. The whole lander weighed just 33 kg, and it rode to Mars on the back of the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, launched in June 2003.
Pillinger raised money wherever he could and enlisted famous names to keep the project in the news. As well as Blur's call sign, the lander carried a colour calibration chart painted by Damien Hirst, one of his trademark spot paintings.
Silence
Beagle 2 separated from Mars Express on 19 December 2003 and was due to land in a broad, flat basin called Isidis Planitia six days later. When the call sign never came, weeks of searching followed. In February 2004 the lander was declared lost, and it was widely assumed it had crashed.
Found
For more than a decade Beagle 2 was a mystery. Then, in January 2015, the team announced that it had been found in images from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Michael Croon, who had worked on Mars Express, had spotted a tiny bright feature in the landing area. Follow-up images showed the lander sitting on the surface, close to its target.
It had landed safely. But of its four petal-shaped solar panels, not all had opened, and the ones that stayed folded were covering the radio antenna. Beagle 2 had almost certainly been sitting there, intact and unable to speak, since Christmas Day 2003.
The lander had done the hardest part. It had crossed hundreds of millions of kilometres and set down gently on another world.
Colin Pillinger died in May 2014, less than a year before the discovery. His colleagues said it would have delighted him to know how close the mission came.
What happened next
Mars Express, the orbiter that carried Beagle 2, turned out to be one of Europe's most successful missions, still sending back pictures of Mars more than twenty years later. And Britain's next attempt to explore the Martian surface is already built: the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, assembled by Airbus in Stevenage, is due to launch in 2028. Read more about Britain's part in exploring the Solar System on our British astronomy page, or see where Mars is tonight on the Mars page.
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