Posted: Tue, Dec 20, 2005, 8:24 AM ET (1324 GMT)
Officials with the failed Beagle 2 Mars lander mission said Monday that they believe they have spotted the site where the spacecraft crashed on the Martian surface nearly two years ago. Images of the planned landing site of the spacecraft, taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, show several bright pixels that one photointerpretation expert believes to be the spacecraft and/or the airbags designed to cushion the spacecraft's landing. The British-built Beagle 2, which flew to Mars as a secondary payload on ESA's Mars Express orbiter, was to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, but the spacecraft was never heard from after detaching from Mars Express several days before landing. Beagle 2 project leader Colin Pillinger said that, based on the images, the spacecraft operated normally but had the back luck to land on the side the crater, exposing the spacecraft to forces that the airbags were not designed for. Inquiries into the mission after its failure concluded that the spacecraft suffered from many problems during its development that could have prevented it from working at Mars. Similar imagery studies were performed by NASA to try and look for the site of Mars Polar Lander, a larger spacecraft that crashed on the Martian surface in 1999, but failed to turn up any conclusive evidence.

Related Links:

•  The Times of London article
•  BBC article
•  Reuters article
•  The Independent article
•  The Daily Telegraph article