Any one of a number of technical malfunctions might have caused the loss of Beagle 2, the ill-fated British space probe that vanished while attempting to land on Mars, an investigation found on Tuesday.
A six-month inquiry by project organisers, their second attempt to discover what went wrong with the mission, was unable to pinpoint why the tiny craft vanished shortly before it landed on Mars on Christmas Day last year.
In May, Professor Colin Pillinger, the British scientist who masterminded the project, said unusually thin air over the landing site caused by dust storms was the most likely reason behind its presumed destruction.
This was still a possible reason for the probe’s loss, the new report said, explaining that instruments on the Mars Express spacecraft which carried Beagle 2 to the Red Planet showed signs of unusually low atmospheric density.
“Improved characterisation of the Martian atmosphere is, in the view of the Beagle 2 team, critical to the success of future missions,” the investigation concluded.
However the report said that despite rigorous testing, a number of potential systems malfunctions had not been ruled out.
These included electronic failures, a puncture on one of Beagle’s cushioning gas bags, a failure of the craft to deploy its instruments, damage to the heat shield and a broken communications antenna.
It was also possible, although unlikely, that Beagle 2 unexpectedly hit one of a pair of craters discovered in the predicted landing site, the report said.
The miniature probe had been due to land on Mars on December 25 last year before flipping open like a pocket watch and beginning its work, but it disappeared without trace.
In contrast, a pair of US probes sent to Mars around the same time landed perfectly and sent back streams of data.
The earlier report into Beagle’s loss criticised severe organisational failures with the mission, which had been intended to search for evidence of life on Mars.
Such were the worries about the mission ahead of its launch that one leading member of the European Space Agency said he had wondered whether it might have been better cancelled, the investigation in May said.
