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Beagle 2 probe may have been found; Mars water disputed

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Written by staff
Wednesday, 28 December 2005
>lost dog found? The wreckage of Britain’s Beagle 2 Mars probe may have been found, according to a recent Associated Press report. Colin Pillinger, the Beagle 2 project’s lead scientist, says that images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft show a crater near the intended 2003 landing site that has features consistent with impact damage, although the probe itself is too small to show up in the pictures. While it is still not known why the Beagle 2 craft failed upon reaching Mars, one theory is that it hit the Martian surface too hard because the atmosphere turned out to be thinner than expected. Pillinger is seeking funding for another Mars mission. >dry me a river When NASA announced in March 2004 that the Mars rover Opportunity had found evidence of the past existence of a shallow, salty sea on Mars, we were pretty darn happy. Now, according to CNN, two research teams are trying to make us sad again by publishing two independent papers in the journal Nature, both of which offer alternate (non-water-related) explanations for the sedimentary rocks found by Opportunity. One paper suggests an asteroid could have caused the formations;, the other suggests a volcano. Unlike the shallow, salty sea theory, neither of these scenarios would have been hospitable to life. We hope they’re wrong.

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