MainlyMartian

Sad news

Colin Pillinger has revealed that he has been diagnosed with primary-progressive MS, a very unusual blow to receive in your sixties. According to Pallab's report he's being characteristically determined in the face of this misfortune  which is probably all to the good. I'm sure all of us wish him well.

"Open in a different sort of way"

Sorry to have been away so long. When the Beagle report came out, I was happily wandering around the Cheviots, near the English/Scottish border. And I'd have been a lot less happy if I'd been discovering that ESA was refusing to publish the results of the Beagle inquiry. In fact I'd have been really quite cross.

I mean we paid for the damn thing. We deserve an account of how it was lost. Or rather, of the various ways in which it might have been lost, since no smoking gun ever turned up. I'm a European with a fair degree of sympathy for our current continental project, but this sort of behind-closed-doors, if-we'd-been-in-charge-it-would-have-been-OK approach reminds me just why European institutions are not trusted by the public. Combine this euro-paternalism with the market-supremacist anglo-saxon "commercial confidentiality" stuff -- is there really no way that companies doing public work can be forced to do without this confidentiality when their work clearly failed? -- and it feels like the worst of all possible worlds.

It's also a disservice to people elsewhere trying to put together future space missions. The reports into the 1999 NASA losses had a lot of nuggets for future mission designers. (The fact that the most important of them -- "you really should have a radio link sending telemetry back as you go through the atmosphere" -- was ignored by the Beaglers doesn't mean it wasn't a crucial lesson. Quite the reverse.)

You have to feel for poor David Southwood, ESA's head of science. My friends at the Economist quote him saying "We live in an open society too, but it's open in a different way", and conceding "that having the inspector general of ESA chair the inquiry did 'a little bit of harm to the word independent'." I'll say. But sorry though one feels for Southwood -- he's a nice, smart guy who must be embarrassed about having to say things like that -- his position is not a terribly good one. In fact, you could argue that Southwood really should have resigned by now. According to an interview he did with Pallab for BBC online, Southwood thought Beagle should have been cancelled back in 2001 because it was too risky. And he thought that if he had argued this way within ESA, he could have got it cancelled. And he didn't try.

If he had, we might have avoided losing the hefty-but-still-indeterminate (can't ESA and/or the British government even release a full project budget to us all? Or is that commercially sensitive too?) sum spent on Beagle 2. If that money (and effort) had not been spent on Beagle 2 we might have saved Eddington, killed by budget pressure last year. We might even have an ESA-sanctioned Netlander ready for 2007. (Netlander would probably have died anyway; but being in a position to say it would be the first European mission to the martian surface might have done it some good)

Everyone says that you shouldn't be swayed by hindsight. But Southwood had foresight. He looked at the Beagle project, and with admirable foresight thought "this is too risky -- I should really argue for its cancellation". And then he went along with it. By way of justification he suggests that ESA needed to become a bit faster cheaper and better. But the Mars Express programme met those requirements even without Beagle on board. The parliamentary committee that's going to hold hearings on the loss of Beagle 2 might like to take these matters up with him.

Meanwhile, Pillinger pours scorn on the ESA report's published recommendations as "motherhood statements". I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Maybe Pillinger doesn't approve of motherhood much. If he did, then maybe Beagle 2 would have complied with a few more of these "motherhood statements". Take number 10: "Future planetary missions should be designed with robust margins to cope with the inherent uncertainties, and they should not be initiated without adequate and timely resources to achieve that." Yes, it may be a motherhood statement -- but it didn't apply to Beagle 2. Likewise number 12: "For future planetary entry missions, a more robust communications system should be used, allowing direct commanding of the lander for essential actuations and resets without software involvement -- enabling recoveries in catastrophic situations." Likewise most of the rest of the recommendations.

These recommendations would have more heft if the report showing the degree to which Beagle didn't match up to them were to be published, and I think it's scummy that it's not available to Colin any more than to the rest of us (though he's been briefed on it). But even without the report, you kind of have to assume that when the recommendations say something like (number 15) "Elimination of internal connectors for mass saving should be avoided if at all possible. But if unavoidable, a stringent system of check and independent crosscheck should be followed during the final wiring operation," it means that Beagle 2 did eliminate some internal connectors to save mass, and that a stringent system of check and independent crosscheck wasn't followed. That's not a motherhood statement. It appears to be a clear, specific criticism.

But Colin is not very good on criticism. I remember hearing him and David Southwood talking about this at a press event at the Royal Society last year. Colin took umbrage at the suggestion that outside review was necessary, and did so in what I found a rather striking way. As I remember it -- I'd be open to correction -- he argued that no-one had a greater interest in the success of Beagle 2 than the Beagle 2 team, and so no one would do a better job of evaluating the project than they themselves would do. I think this was a) sincere and b) testimony to the fact that Colin just doesn't see the point of outside criticism. I'd say this is a significant lack in someone trying to manage something as complex and un-get-rightable as a planetary lander mission.

The Pill now seems to be taking the line that it was Mars that failed, not the Beagle. The martian atmosphere obstinately refused to perform in the way it was expected to, and that screwed everything up. I don't know how plausible this is -- as I mentioned before, there's some doubt on the matter, and the views of the ESA panel are of course unavailable to us -- but even if it is plausible, a) other failure modes are plausible too and b) surely a decent lander design should have taken atmospheric uncertainties into account. But the idea that Beagle 2 was imperfect in any way (other, perhaps, than a lack of support, financial and otherwise) is not one Colin explores very readily in public.

Talking to Tim Radford in the Guardian, he tells us that the way the Beagle 2 team pulled together was "a model that everybody should follow". To put it mildly, there is no evidence that this is the case. He goes on to say "I think we probably did more to inspire interest in science and engineering in the country than anything else ever done before." Really? Isambard Kingdom Brunel -- or for that matter Frank Hornby -- thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Colin goes on to say "I don't think the country will begrudge Beagle 2 being given some more money". On this last one, he may well be right. Most people don't really care about what space missions do. They're just glad we have them. Heroic failure now and then just makes it more romantic, in a cavalier sort of way. I, on the other hand, want space missions to work, not to waste money, and to produce data. It's not clear to me that Beagle 2 fits this roundhead agenda at all.

There's a tendency -- Tim shows it, I think the Independent editorialised along the same lines, and I've picked it up elsewhere -- to indulge the romantic spirit, and the Pill. To say "at least they tried" and "they nearly got there" (an untested assumption -- Beagle 2 may have been dead three times over from different faults, or incapable of doing science. We just don't know). And then to suggest the team should try again. I think this is a tendency worth resisting. A lot of people's hard work was lost because the Beagle 2 project was mismanaged, rushed and hand to mouth. The romantic response to this point is a better-to-have-loved-and-lost sort of thing; people say that if Beagle 2 hadn't been mismanaged, rushed and hand to mouth it would never have happened in the first place. Well here's the thing. Whatever happened in teh first place, in the final analysis it didn't happen.

Obviously there's good stuff to be taken from the Beagle 2 experience. But it was bought at a stiff price. And to say that there were not real lessons to be learned, and it shouldn't have been handled very differently and that it was just unlucky, and that all we need do now is try again -- that's just insulting to the idea of doing these things properly. Which is bad for the people who pay for these projects, and bad for the people who work on them.

Notes from Nice (7): European landers

(This post was delayed due to a profound lack of togetherness on my part)

On Wednesday evening, in a crowded and uncomfortably warm meeting room, a sampling of European planetary scientists with an interest in Mars, including a number of Mars Express people, gathered to discuss plans for the surface. So far, European attempts to reach the Martian surface have not been happy ones. The joint Russian/ESA Mars 96 mission, which carried some surface landers and penetrators, never made it to orbit. Netlander, which would have set up a system of seismometers and other instruments, never made it to the launch pad. And then there was Beagle 2.

This string of failures means that the surface of Mars is effectively an American preserve, and European scientists don't particularly like that. So for a couple of hours they kicked around ideas about what might be done.  There were no decisions, and no consensus. But the debate did throw up a number of key factors and some fundamental choices.

Key factor the first: it is going to be very hard for Europe to do anything that comes even remotely close to the ambition, scope and achievement of the current American program, let alone the vigorously expanded American program that might be in place by the time any of the European missions actually flies. Europe is talking about Pathfinder scale missions like that which America mounted in the mid-1990s for flight opportunities when America will be flying the Mars Science Laboratory, an all-singing, all-dancing, long-duration "MER on steroids". (There's an interesting piece in the New York Times today arguing that America's scientific and technological lead is slipping. This may be true on earth, in some respects, but it surely isn't true on the surface of Mars)

This is the context for a first crucial choice: "keep it simple, stupid" versus scientific ambition. There's a strong argument for a KISS mission with a lot of safety margin built into its engineering specifications, one that would be counted a success if it simply got something on to the surface. It might not have much of a scientific payload, but it would get the job done. Later missions could then build on the first success. It's hard not to feel sympathy for this view: getting to Mars is hard, it's best to walk before you run, and so on. The argument is given extra weight by previous failure. Like the MER rovers this year, the next European attempt to reach the surface really has to work.

There's a technical problem here, but not an insurmountable one. Proponents of such a mission argue that once you have a landing system you can modify it for future missions. In practice this has not proved to be possible. Landing systems don't scale very well. Turning the airbag system designed for Pathfinder into teh airbag system that served for the much larger MERs was incredibly hard work -- various people on the mission ended up wishing they had designed something new from scratch. The rocket system designed for the Polar Lander will be used, in modified form, on the Phoenix lander; but teh system for the Mars Science Laboratory landers will be different again. If you design a nice little lander for a KISS mission, its entry descent and landing (EDL) system might not be much good for follow on missions if they were more ambitious.

However, that's really jsut a warning against overselling such a mission, rather than trying it. EDL systems don't scale -- but EDL expertise does, as Albert Haldemann of JPL pointed out. JPL's advantage is not that it has existing off-the-shelf EDL systems, but that it has a cadre of engineers capable of designing new ones because of the experience they've amassed. Even a primitive KISS mission would provide the beginnings of a similar body of expertise within ESA.

Perhaps a bigger problem is that a safety-first bare-bones lots-of-margin mission, sensible though it might well be, might end up satisfying no one. The scientists will want science. The politicians will want something that makes Europe look at least vaguely competitive -- spending hundreds of millions on an extraordinary technical achievement that is completely overshadowed by someone else is not terribly attractive. A KISS mission would fall into the ancient trap of making sense as part of an ongoing programme, but not on its own.

Hence the argument for ambition; let's plan a mission that does something really ballsy on the science front, thus trying for an end run of some sort. The problem here is that this was the Beagle strategy. And right now it doesn't look very good.

The thing the people in the room seem most clearly agreed on is that a straightforward reflight of Beagle is not an option. No one knows what happened to Beagle -- according to people who seemed to be in the know, no single fatal engineering flaw has been discovered by the ESA inquiry into the loss. Instead a range of things that might have gone wrong has been identified. The inquiry apparently briefed Pillinger and UK science minister David Sainsbury on its findings last week -- including, I imagine, its criticisms of management and oversight -- but it is not going to release them in a final form until mid-May or so. (An interesting detail here is that the Mars Express results that had seemed to support the idea that the atmosphere's density profile was very different form what had been expected -- effectively pinning some or all of the blame on Mars itself, or at least on those who model its atmosphere -- seem to have gone away, at least as far as the Mars Expressionists in Nice were concerned.)

With no certainty as to the nature of the Beagle loss, it's a fair bet that the next European mission to the Martian surface will have an EDL system designed afresh, almost certainly by ESA's own technical staff. Among other things, that means there would be no chance of flying anything before the 2009 launch opportunity.

This scheduling points up the more general problem with an end-run high-ambition approach: American scientists are just as bright as European scientists, they and their engineers are much more experienced in this area, and they are far better funded. While Beagle had the putative advantage of doing science that the MER rovers couldn't in terms of analysing carbon compounds, by 2009 that will be gone. MSL may well end up with instruments capable of doing a lot of the things that Beagle was meant to do -- and doing them to a series of samples carefully chosen from any part of a large well-mapped field location, rather than to whatever came to hand (or paw) within a metre or so of the landing site.

A more plausible way of distinguishing the European program would be to go for science that America is not currently pursuing. This is the allure of  "network science" -- stations scattered across the planet that would do seismology and also monitor the weather and climate. A surface science program built along those lines would produce science that nothing currently planned in America is looking for. The problem is that this is exactly the science that the cancelled Netlander project was going to do. And, not to belabour the point, it was cancelled.

Some Netlander advocates at the meeting seemed to think that they might get a successor project up and running by co-opting the Beagle community. Develop a spacecraft that could carry a modified Beagle package or a Netlander package. Fly a few of each. Everyone's happy. Except the people who pay for what looks a lot like two missions, not one -- with a series of further netlanders now in the pipeline. And the engineers who get asked to design a single spacecraft bus that can do two very different things -- something that never works out as well as people contrive to convince themselves it might.

And then there's the problem of ExoMars. ExoMars is meant to be the first stage of the European "Aurora" programme, a lander and orbiter combination dedicated to Mars's biological potential that ESA talks of launching in 2009. The fact that there was a hot-and-sweaty-meeting-room-full of people discussing completely different approaches to the martian surface when they could have been off having convivial dinners can be taken as an indicator of how likely the European planetary science community thinks that 2009 mission is. If people really believed there was going to be a sophisticated European rover mission launched just five years from now they wouldn't have needed to discuss anything else.

But the people committed to ExoMars -- who are probably pretty reconciled to the idea that their mission will slip to 2011 or 2013 -- know that if some other mission sneaks in in front of them then they'll be delayed even further, especially if it's an ambitious mission.

So my reading of the micropolitics ended up like this. Netlander people are unlikely to get to Mars unless they can expand their remit and their interest-group-constituency with some set of astrobiological objectives. ExoMars people are likely to resist a major pre-ExoMars astrobiology mission. Beagle people will be in the middle of that conflict.

And if I was in charge? Of the possibilities on offer, I'd tend to back a simple Netlander-plus, with the crucial proviso that all its landers be nuclear powered and long lived. If you can develop a robust EDL system for dropping a series of seismic stations to the surface, and if those stations are long lived (which means nuclear batteries) then you can build up your network of seismometers (and surface weather stations) over time. It's a very different sort of virtual presence from that offered by rovers, but you could argue its a crucial and complementary one. It's not something America is likely to do soon, because it's probably too ambitious an undertaking for a single Scout mission (network-science scouts didn't make it to the final shortlist last time) and most of the other missions are pretty well defined. And if the Mars Express Mars-is-still-active theme pans out, seismology could look newly attractive. (As one scientist put it, "we need to be sure there are seisms before we try seismology")

And the Beagle instruments? I'd put them forward for inclusion on MSL.

Back to the Beagle

I spent some of the morning at the Royal Society at a meeting devoted to Beagle 2 that looked at what went wrong and what happens next. "What next" was the afternoon topic, and so I missed it, but given that this was a Pillinger show, I think it’s a fair bet that the answer was more Beagles, launched on rockets of their own rather than hitch-hiking on a pre-existing orbiter mission.

The morning's what-went-wrong sessions were interesting, if inconclusive. The lack of an entry, descent and landing telemetry link, one that could have sent back data, means that much of this is speculation, and likely to remain so. Pillinger’s line on the telemetry continues to be that a) it couldn’t be done (because there was no suitable on orbit relay asset) and b) the mass of the transmitter required would have meant making unacceptable cuts in the science package, scaling Beagle 2 back to a "me-too" mission rather than a unique scientific opportunity. The question this begs is that, given these limitations, did it make sense to spend that much money on a mission that couldn’t even reveal its own fate? This is a subset of the more general question that still hangs over Beagle 2 – if it could not be done properly, was it worth doing at all?

Anyway, here’s the news. There’s no clear evidence of anything at the landing site visible in MOC images. There are a few scattered bright pixels, including an aligned set of spots dubbed the "string of pearls" which seems to have caught some imaginations, but according to Pillinger Mike Malin, the MOC god, thinks these are all instrument noise (the string runs more or less along a scan line inside the camera). New images of the landing site from Themis and MOC both suggest that the original estimates of the hazards due to craters, rocks and hillocky cones were about right – such features seem to cover around 10% of the site. They wouldn’t all necessarily be deadly, but they do constitute an irreducible hazard.

A new factor that has turned up is that according to one of the Mars Express instruments, Spicam, seems to be showing that the density of the atmosphere at altitudes of 30km to 40km is a good bit lower than was thought. This is the altitude at which Beagle 2 would have been doing a lot of its deceleration, and if there was less atmosphere there to decelerate in that would be bad – opening the possibility that, for instance, the under-impeded lander might have reached the surface before it turned its altimeter on, or, I suppose, at too high a speed for its airbags. Thus it would have transitioned from aerobraking to lithobreaking. However, teh spicam data is not from the landing site, nor, if I heard correctly, from the same time of day as the landing. Also it seems that the Spicam readings on the atmospheric density profile are not backed up by measurements being made by a NASA orbiter at the moment (they said Mars Observer, but I suspect it may be MGS, which is able to compare its TES readings looking down to the rovers' mini-TES readings looking up. But I could be wrong.). The disagreement doesn't mean Spicam's wrong, but it does mean more work is needed. (It's worth noting that both the rovers seem to have been less slowed by teh atmosphere than expected during their entries.)

Perhaps the most intriguing possibility, though, was that something might have gone wrong before or during the spinup and release of the lander from Mars Express on December 19th, back when this blog was a shiny new thing and it was all trees round here (apologies for trope-theft to Sean Geer). At the time, I noticed that the picture of Beagle pulling away had a bright star like object in it, and wondered whether it might be Mars. It wasn’t, and it wasn’t a star, either, and it probably wasn’t an instrumental artefact, though Mark Sims, the man presenting this data and teh Beagle 2 mission manager, seemed to want us to think that was still a possibility. So it could have been some debris falling off one or other of the spacecraft. What’s more, if you look at the Beagle itself in the same image you can see an anomalous light patch in the shadowy part at about two o’clock. That could be nothing, says Sims – but it also could be everything. He was very clear that he didn’t want to speculate further on the matter. They’re looking at the other pictures in the same series to see if there’s anything else to be learned. One interesting detail – though he said the series of pictures confirmed that Beagle had headed off in the right direction at the right speed, he didn’t say whether it confirmed that it had the correct spin rate. The possibility that this picture, of which I was always fond, might be telling us something kind of piqued my interest. If it was just the stray blurry thing, or just the light patch on the spacecraft, that would be one thing. But the two together does seem kind of suggestive. Watch this space.

Dead Dog

So, at a press conference in London this afternoon, Colin Pillinger declares Beagle 2 all but officially dead. The latest round of attempted communications turned up nothing, and there is no plausible scenario in which the spacecraft has not yet transmitted anything at a time when we've been listening but is still capable of transmitting something. There is a last chance involving a reboot procedure, but it's clear that almost no hope at all is held out for it. On February sixth, it appears, the decision to draw a line under the mission. But as Pillinger says, everyone involved is now "looking to the future" -- specifically, the possibility of reflying the Beagle payload in some way or other in 2007.

There will be an inquiry, or a review, under the auspices of ESA. No-one yet knows who will chair it or serve on it. Its biggest problem will be that Beagle was out of contact from the moment when it left Mars Express, and so ascertaining when whatever went wrong went wrong is going to be hard. (The flight team is currently reanalysing all the data from before the separation to make sure that Beagle 2 was absolutely OK up until then). It's worth noting that Spirit and Opportunity both sent back telemetry all through their descent - and, as I understand it, the decision to arrange matters so that they could stay in constant touch actually increased the risk of failure, because it constrained their descent times to the mid afternoon, which is when the wind risks were highest. The need to know what had gone wrong if there was an accident trumped the need to minimise the risk of an accident.

If you're running a program that needs to learn from its mistakes, that's a good position to take (and one mandated by NASA, I think, after the telemetry-free loss of Mars Polar Lander). Colin insists that there was no way at all that the mass for a telemetry system that worked during entry, descent and landing could have been freed up. Unfortunately, that now makes it harder to turn the one-off Beagle 2 mission into an  ongoing program - which is what the Pill is angling for. If no one can ever say for sure why Beagle 2 failed, the case for trying again is clearly weakened. Every time the team would say "we've thought of everything" the sceptical reply would be "you said that last time".

While we're at it, it might be quite a good idea at this point to provide an open accounting of who paid what for the project, a subject on which I for one am still rather hazy (for example, there was once talk of 10 million pounds in sponsorship: how much of this materialised, and did the British Government made up the difference?) 

I have a certain ambivalence to all this. I would have loved it if Beagle had got safely to the surface and made its measurements.  For a long time I had doubts that it was going to be able to, because it just seemed a priori unlikely that a team with no experience of running planetary missions would be able successfully to mount an ambitious one at a headlong rush on a tiny budget. They weren't deeply informed reservations - just doubts. They might have been erased - or confirmed - if I had done some reporting on the project, but Colin, while always being perfectly pleasant to me when we met, made it clear I was a journalist he didn't want too close. He declined to speak to me when I was assigned to write about Beagle 2 first by Science and then by the Telegraph magazine. That's his right, though it pissed me off at the time.

So with no professional reason to spend a lot of time thinking about Beagle 2 I came to the opinion that, since it was going to go ahead anyway, I should just sit back and hope for the best. Writing anti-Beagle stories - "Why is the government spending so much on something which has only a 50-50 chance of success?" etc - seemed unproductive and even a little unsporting. And the possibility of success was beguiling. Now that possibility is no more, it seems that at least some of those questions really should be asked before we start talking about reflying the mission in 2007, as Colin was today. For example, it would be nice to know more about the reasons why a Beagle follow on didnt even make the shortlist when it was proposed for the 2007 Mars Scout opportunity.

If you want really vituperative anti-Beaglism, though, I'm not your guy -- Jeffrey Bell is. Bell's the only person I know of who has actually argued in public that Beagle 2's demise is a good thing. Bell, an astronomer based in Hawaii, is outspoken in a way that can be quite brave -- I remember him standing up to Dan Goldin rather magnificently at a space science meeting in the early 1990s. There's some merit in some of the points in his argument that the Beagle's demise is something to be welcomed; other parts seem poorly founded, and one aside is foolishly malicious in a way that only ignorance of what the accusation actually means in context could come close to excusing.

And so it goes

Back to Camden for the last time this afternoon, to see if Mars Express, now in a suitable polar orbit, will pick up anything as it passes over Beagle 2�s presumed landing site. The press room is absolutely packed, with at least a dozen TV crews. Colin is, for the first time, looking and sounding tired, maybe beaten. His tongue slips, only in minor ways, but enough to break something of the magic of his patter as he talks us through what could happen on this pass and in the future. Then, at three o�clock, David Southwood, ESA�s head of science, speaks to us over a poor-quality TV hookup from mission control in Darmstadt. It�s not good news, and Southwood�s not putting a particularly brave face on it. There�s no trace of Beagle in the data from Mars Express.

There are still some plausible scenarios in which Beagle is pretty much OK, but having difficulties in making contact. Over the next month they�re going to explore these possibilities. But though they�re plausible, the overwhelming likelihood now has to be that something went drastically wrong during the entry, descent and landing.

The loss has been oddly gradual. Those more closely involved could probably say when they began to feel that hope was forlorn, but to a more casual observer it�s hard. The lack of contact at Christmas was a disappointment but not fatal; the near certainty of loss today was no surprise, really. And for me, at least, there was no clear moment in between when hope went through a step change from high to low. It just faded until it was more a memory of hope than hope itself. And now the memory of the hope is all there is.

More silent nights

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.

"Are you worried?" "Not yet"

Quite something to see; Colin Pillinger hears the disappointing news and is immediately fielding the questions. He's not cheery, but he's calm. You can if you like read disappointment in his face, but it's kept out of his words. And it may be more a return to waiting than outright disappointment -- the absence of elation more than the presence of serious doubt. Spacecraft misbehave; it may all be as simple as that.

He lists some of the things that could be wrong, straightforwardly if a little quietly. The antenna could be pointed the wrong way; the spacecraft could not be in the place where Mars Odyssey was looking. The Beagle 2/Mars Odyssey link has never been tested end to end and may have a flaw in it. (The Beagle 2/Mars Express link has been tested, but Mars Express won't be in a good orbit for communicating with Beagle until January 4th. A successful Mars Express test doesn't necessarily mean that the Odyssey link is OK as well; among other factors, Mars Express uses a slightly different communications protocol to that of Mars Odyssey). All this seems plausible (though the idea that Beagle may have hit a completely different spot on Mars seems perhaps be a little unlikely).

Jodrell Bank will listen out for a couple of hours tonight, starting at 22:00, and should pick up beagle no matter where it is or its antenna is pointing (as long as its pointing pretty much up, not down). After that  the next favourable Mars Odyssey pass is around 18:45 on the 26th (all times GMT). If  there's nothing from Jodrell tonight the word "disappointment" will be upgraded to "setback", at least; I'd expect "growing worries". If there's nothing tomorrow then people will be getting very worried indeed.

Not much more to say. Last time I watched something like this happen, when Mars Polar Lander got to the planet four years ago, there were all sorts of plausible explanations for the spacecraft's initial silence. The fact that I'm getting deja vu doesn't mean history is repeating itself. When someone asked me earlier tonight what I thought Beagle's chances were, I said 50:50, and this doesn't really change that assessment much. But by changing it just a little it puts the odds against Beagle, even if by only a bit.

We'll just have to wait and see. But before that, time to sleep and eat.

The Beagle has...

Television cameras have started to breed in the press room, and TV people are putting on ties. It sounds as if we're going to be getting some news any minute now -- and since this is earlier than we might have epxected, I havea slight presumption that the news could be good.

05:59 Pillinger, who is now completely festooned with radio mikes, has just told us that the person at the other end of teh phone clamped to his ear -- someone at JPL, which runs the Deep Space Network -- has confirmed that Odyssey is in contact with the earth.

06:04 The phone is still to his ear, the room is pretty silent.

06:06 A mobile rings. It's Colin's. Once he gets past all the mike wires and radio transmitters stuck to his belt he chucks it to an assistant.

06:07 Beagle data will not be the first thing in this transmission, apparently (nor was it expected to be).

06:10 A TV guy on teh other side of his room is keeping up a low commentary to his studio, presumably to accompany live footage of Colin with a phone to his ear. He's been keeping this commentary up for about ten minutes now. Must be riveting.

06:15 There was no signal from Beagle 2 sent back by Odyssey.

Mars Express in orbit

And now, some real news. Mars Express, which has been behind Mars for an hour or so, has re-emerged, and it appears, judging by the carrier wave being received back on earth, to have made it into orbit. Details of which orbit won't be available till 09:00 or so, when it transmits some data back on a higher frequency and the mission controllers can get the details of its rocket burn. But there's no reason not to think it's done pretty much what was desired of it. The preliminary data are definitely good news.

You might expect this to have engendered a bit of a reaction -- glad yawps, whoops of triumph -- but most people are in the hall drinking coffee, not in the main room watching the transmission from ESA's mission control in Darmstadt. The media here are all highly focused on Beagle -- Mars Express is treated as a means to an end, rather than as a swiss-army-knife triumph of a spacecraft bristling with all sorts of new instruments for exploring the planet's surface and subsurface. Understandable -- but a bit galling.

Still, only two hours to go. The timeline for ESA's internal television coverage of what's going on informs me that at 06:30, when the Beagle signal is due to arrive, "Pillinger intends reaction". I bet he does.