Happy Christmas! Back in Greenwich the turkey is soaking in a subtly spicey brine, the stuffing is made, the stock is brewed up; I am now in Camden Town, along with various Pillingers, other Beagle 2 people, enthusiasts and working press. As I type Colin is doing his 10,000th press interview on the other side of the press room.
Touchdown is set for about 02:45. However we won't know whether it went off OK or not until sometime between six and seven, when NASA's Mars Odyssey will pass overhead and be able to relay a we-made-it message back to Camden, via NASA's Deep Space Network. If that message is received then everything should be tickety boo. If not, then people start worrying. The default plan is that if the relay doesn't work as planned in the early morning, then later on Christmas day the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank -- a great British technoscience icon -- will lock on to the planet and listen out. Beagle's transitter, as Colin has just explained to the BBC, is only about as powerful as a mobile phone, but such is the power of radio astronomical equipment that if Beagle is transmitting, Jodrell Bank should find it. (John Agar, a historian of science at Cambridge, has written books about both Jodrell Bank and mobile phones. He should obviously be here instead of me.)
If no signal makes it to Jodrell Bank then, as I understand it, things start to look as if they're headed in a generally pear-shaped direction.
Camden Town, Dickensians will remember, is where Bob Cratchit lived. What finer place to be working on Christmas.
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