After a few days devoted to the slow destruction of a very large turkey (yummy, thanks very much) it's back to the world next door. In some respects, nothing has happened; Beagle is as silent as it was on Christmas morning. But the context of the silence has been getting steadily worse. Nothing has been picked up either by Mars Odyssey, the NASA satellite acting as a relay, or from Jodrell Bank, which is attempting to pick up signals directly. In a few days, apparently, the Stanford radio telescope will be used to ping Mars Odyssey, thus checking out the receiver that is meant to be listening out for Beagle. If that test shows Odyssey to be a broken link in the comms chain, though, we would still have to account for the lack of signal at Jodrell Bank.
The most parsimonious explanation for not hearing anything through either of the comms channels being tried is that there are not currently any transmissions from the Beagle. This does not necessarily mean that the Beagle is lost, though. One possibility is that it is not transmitting at the pre-arranged times. This has to some extent been addressed, without noticeable benefit, but further attempts to get Beagle 2 to transmit on demand are continuing. Another possibility now being floated is that the Beagle may be in a crater and as a result either have had trouble unfolding properly or be shielded from view by the crater walls. There's a Themis image of the crater (Themis is a spectrometer/camera on Mars Odyssey) here which shows the crater and the rocky ejecta around it. I remember a similar suspect crater being found when Mars Polar Lander went AWOL, and remember it as being one more false hope. The crater scenario is clearly possible, but not all that likely -- as this picture (a picture from one of the Viking mosaics, I think) shows, an awful lot of the possible landing site isn't in the crater. And if the crater is to blame then it's not terribly reassuring; that blocky ejecta could be nasty stuff.
It's obviously worth working all the angles and hoping that something will turn up, most likely when Mars Express gets in range in a couple of weeks. You don't write off as much as a million people-years of work (one estimate being bandied about at the press centre) without being absolutely sure there's no hope). But there's no point in denying that the "entry, descent and landing" part of Beagle's mission had ample space for accident and mishap, and that such a mishap now looks like the single most likely explanation for the silence.
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