MainlyMartian

Past three o'clock...

A few minutes ago, Beagle 2's trajectory intersected with the surface of Mars. If all went well, it did so fairly gently; as Colin Pillinger put it as he talked a room full of us through the sequence in real time, the final drop when the airbags burst is "like pushing your computer off a desk". If all didn't go well, then it was a bit more like dropping your computer off a cliff, out of the back door of an airliner, or from the airlock of a space shuttle. As of now, we don't know. We all clapped at the appropriate moment, though -- who wouldn't?

There are about 60 of us here now, mostly journalists but a fair few people who have worked on the project and a couple of pop stars -- Michelle Klaas and someone from Blur whose name I don't remember (no, I didn't know who Michelle Klaas was -- I had to ask. Note added later -- she's actually called Myleene Klass, so I didn't ask very well) In a strange usurpation of the real, we spent the minutes while Beagle was plunging through the atmosphere watching a simulation of what was going on, Beagle being in complete radio silence at the moment. (If things do turn out to have gone wrong -- if Beagle never speaks to us again -- that silence will make a post mortem more or less impossible, since it will be all but impossible to know what actually went wrong where.)  We've all seen the animation, or very similar animations, before, but knowing that it was synchronised to what should be going on over Mars, and watching it as part of an event definitely added something to the occasion. Colin's shouted corrections to Pallab Ghosh's commentary for BBC radio also added something:
PG, dramatically: "Beagle 2 is now glowing red hot..."
CP, shouting from the other side of the room: "No, not yet!"

Above Mars, Mars Express has lit its engines to go into orbit. We'll hear whether that rocket burn has been successful at about 04.30; word from Beagle should come back about two hours later.

Meanwhile we're all, in Colin's words, "reliving a moment that might be happening" as the real-time-synched documentary shows Beagle's first activities as they should be (literally) unfolding. It's like an interplanetary Schrodinger's cat: at the moment, Beagle is a superposition of success and failure, the two states unresolved and unresolvable. All we can do is watch what should be happening and wait.

One o'clock

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.

The photographic proof

The picture I was talking about in the last post is now available here: no idea what the stars are, but it seems possible the smudge near the bottom is actually Mars. I still think it's both wonderful and historic, and that the newspaper photo editors choosing to use artist's impressions instead are missing a trick. The sight of the spacecraft moving through deep space is the iconic image of science fiction film: it's the Discovery pulling slowly by the PoV, it's the star destroyer taking over the top of the screen and pushing us down into Lucas's world like a whale swamping a swimmer. And it has had no real correlate until now. Space agencies spend a great deal on providing animations of their creations alone in the comsos, doing their stuff -- but until now I don't think we've ever seen the real thing.

Nor will we again for some time; there's no offboard camera on the Mars Exploration Rovers that will let us watch as they trundle away. I don't think there's a separation camera on Cassini that will show Huyghens separating and heading off for Saturn (an event that happens on December 25th next year -- another Christmas ruined, at least for some). So SF will remain the place to go for spacecraft seen from other spacecraft for quite some time. The nearest we'll get is if NASA's Deep Impact succeeds in hitting a comet with a projectile as it passes by in 2005, in which case it will be doing something that should actually be visible to earthly telescopes, even quite small ones.

While on the subject of science fiction coming true, one of the reporters yesterday asked Colin Pillinger what his inspiration had been. The Pill says "He's sitting in the audience -- Charles Chilton", and a sweet old man stands up to a round of applause, that protion of it from the younger people polite but a little baffled. Charles Chilton wrote sixty episodes of a BBC radio series called "Journey Into Space" in the 1950s and thus fired a lot of imaginations. I didn't get to ask him what he thought of having inspired a mission to Mars, and by the look of Google News the other hacks didn't, either. I imagine he was jolly pleased.

One of the characters in Journey Into Space, I find, was called Lemmy, which makes me wonder whether Chilton also influenced the soubriquet choice of Motorhead's front man. This would be a very good thing: the more connections between the Pill and iconic metal acts the better the world will be. There appears to ba an accepted origin story that sees "Lemmy" as a contraction of "Lend me", but a choice of name seems to me something that can easily be overdetermined. And Lemmy did start off in the extremely SF-nal Hawkwind.

I can't find any link between Lemmy and electronic music pioneer Trevor Wishart's "Journey into Space", but there Chilton's influence seems certain.

More on the radio show here, including downloads; and here's a wonderful set of covers from Chilton's novelisations. All very swept-wing and Bonestell-y, though with an intriguingly abstract offering from Spain and what appears to be a Gemini capsule going backwards from Italy.

Seeing the back of the Beagle

So today Mars Express lost its hitchhiker, and a large number of scientists felt a surge of relief. Beagle 2 is now falling to Mars, and Mars Express is free to change course and go into orbit. Had the separation not happened, Beagle 2 would have remained a dead weight attached to Mars Express; thus overburdened, Mars Express would have been unable to get into its proper orbit around Mars, and Colin Pillinger would have had to find somewhere a very very long way away to hide.

Happily, though, it all went off rather wonderfully. A couple of hundred people turned up to a "Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye" party at the Royal Geographical Society's headquarters, just next to the Albert Hall, to watch a live link from the Operations Centre at Darmstadt. A lot of hacks, a surprising number of TV crews (including a very nice one from BBC News 24 which recruited me as an enthusing expert for their reporter to talk to) and a large number of people who had actually worked on the project. Just before 11 in the morning we heard that it was "95% certain" that the Beagle's shackles were cut, that its spring had sprung and that it had pushed off on its own. About 20 minutes later we got the final confirmation -- the two spacecraft had separated just as they were supposed to. Applause all round -- specially for Steve Burnage and the rest of the very relieved team that had actually made the release system -- and then a couple of hours listening to speeches, eating vaguely oriental canapes and drinking mulled wine on the off chance that a monitoring camera on Mars Express might have managed to snap a picture of the Beagle as it left. 

The Beagle team made sure that we had properly lowered expectations of this subject of the picture. In the end it turned out a triumph -- the little disk of the Beagle spinning away into a sparse starscape. Very rarely if ever do you actually get to see a planetary spacecraft do something. In fact I'm not sure a picture of a spacecraft in deep space has ever been taken before. It's a moving sight -- something little and human and magnificent, all on its own, moving beyond our ken. The high resolution camera on Mars Express will try to look for Beagle once it's landed (if it lands), as will Mike Malin's camera on Mars Global Surveyor. But it's only the size of a large barbeque, so even if all goes well and it sends back the best data imaginable, it may never be seen again.  Once it's covered in dust it will be one lump in the desert among millions.

Among the guests is the MP Lembit Opik, grandson of a famous astronomer and campaigner for more government spending on protection against asteroids. I mention this mainly so that I can quote the wonderful song about him from Radio 4's "The Now Show":

Lembit Opik
He's lanky and myopic
And he wants to save the world.