Category: Space Sunday

In June 2003 the European Space Agency launched a pair of vehicles to Mars. The larger of the two, an orbiter vehicle called Mars Express, is still in operation today, albeit often overlooked by the media in favour of its American cousins also in orbit around the Red Planet.  The other vehicle, piggybacking on Mars Express, was a tiny lander (quite literally, being just 39 inches across) called Beagle 2.

Designed to search for signs of life, past or present on Mars, Beagle 2 was the Mission That Almost Never Was, because at the time it was proposed, no-one outside of those wanting to build it, wanted it. And yet, even today, the science package it did eventually take to Mars is one of the most remarkable feats of science engineering put together, with capabilities that will not be repeated until NASA flies their one tonne Mars 2020 mission at the start of the next decade.

Sadly, for all its innovation and despite overcoming the odds to actually fly to Mars, Beagle 2 never achieved its goals; all contact was lost on the very day it was due to land on the Red Planet, December 25th, 2003. What happened to it remained a mystery for twelve years, but on Friday, January 16th, members of the Beagle 2 team were able to reveal that the fate of the plucky little lander was now known.

The Beagle 2 story begins in April 1997, when the European Space Agency held a meeting to discuss the possibility of flying an orbiter mission to Mars in 2003, following the failure of an earlier mission. This new mission would be called “Mars Express”, both in recognition of the exceptionally short lead-time to develop and fly it, even using instruments and systems developed for the failed mission, and for the fact that in 2003, Earth and Mars would be the closest they’ve been for some 60,000 years, allowing anything launched around the middle of that year to reach Mars in a comparatively short time.

Professor Colin Pillinger, a planetary scientist and a founder of the Open University’s prestigious Planetary Science Research Institute (since merged with the OU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy), attended the meeting together with his wife Judith, also a planetary scientist. At the time, Professor Pillinger was one of a number of scientists involved in investigating whether or not biogenic features had been discovered in a meteorite found in Antarctica, but which had originated on Mars.

This particular debate was focused on a piece of rock called ALH84001, regarded as one of the oldest pieces of the Solar System, being just over 4 billion years old, and which formed at a time when Mars was likely a warm wet planet. It had been raging for a year with no sign of abating, and Professor Pillinger had already come to the conclusion that one way to settled it would be to put a life sciences package actually on Mars.  He realised the proposed Mars Express mission presented the perfect opportunity for doing so, as did his wife. So much so, that by the time they got back to the UK, she had the perfect name for a mission designed to seek out evidence of life on Mars: Beagle 2, named for the vessel commanded by Captain Robert FitzRoy that carried Charles Darwin on his seminal voyage of discovery.

Given all of the controversy surrounding ALH84001 and the question of possible microbial life on Mars that dated back to the Viking Lander experiments of the 1990s, you’d think the ESA would jump at the opportunity to put a life sciences mission on Mars. Not so; for one thing, others also saw Mars Express as an opportunity to fly their projects to Mars and were busy lobbying. More to the point, it was held that the 6-year time frame for developing a lander mission from scratch was too short.

However, Colin Pillinger was not one to be deterred. In the UK he brought together a team from academia and industry, including Doctor Mark Sims, who was to prove pivotal in the  engineering design of the lander. With many of those involved in the nascent project initially working on it entirely in their own time, Beagle 2 rapidly developed from a series of rough designs “on the backs of beer mats”, to a proposal which, when presented to ESA managers, so impressed them, they provisionally agreed to the idea of flying a lander to Mars – but only if the UK was able to fund it. No money would be forthcoming from ESA.

Thus began one of the most remarkable public relations exercises in annals of space history, with Beagle 2 becoming a household name in the UK, as Colin Pillinger sought to promote in on television, the radio, through newspaper and magazines, and giving public presentations. Space advocacy groups were rallied to the cause, celebrities were brought in to add their weight to things, Parliament and industry were lobbied and won over. In the end, the entire £44 million (US $70 million) was raised, with 50% coming from the UK government and the rest from the private sector.

Continue reading “The Beagle had landed” →

Friday, December 5th marked what will hopefully be the first genuine step humans take in exploring the high frontier of space without total reliance upon robot vehicles. It came in the form of the launch, at 12:05 UT, of the first space vehicle in over forty years to be specifically designed to carry a crew beyond the limits of low Earth orbit and out into the depths of the solar system: the Orion Multi-purpose Crew Vehicle.

Originally, the lift-off had been planned for Thursday, December 4th. However, a series of incidents involving a small boat compromising the range safety exclusion zone, difficult winds over the launch pad, and then technical issues with two fuel valve systems aboard the Delta IV Heavy rocket, prompted the delay of the mission by 24 hours. But when the mission did get under way, it did so flawlessly, and continued in that manner right through until splashdown 4.5 hours later.

Orion launched precisely on time, lifting-off in the post-dawn light of Florida’s Space Coast, and rising smoothly from Launch Complex 37 at Canaveral Air Station. The textbook launch was followed by a mission that followed the flight plan with amazing accuracy to the point where the craft, after a journey that carried it further than any vehicle intended to carry humans has flown in 42 years, and  which saw it punch its way back through the Earth’s atmosphere at 32,000 kph, splashed down just three kilometres or so from its planned target point.

The mission, called Exploration Flight Test 1, was uncrewed, and intended to test all of the critical systems for the vehicle with the exception of the Service Module, which won’t fly until the next Orion mission in 2017. Through the flight all of the system vital to the safety of a crew were put through their paces: the Launch Abort System, radiation protection, heat shield, and multiple parachute systems and the floatation system, together with all the vehicle’s complex flight avionics and software.

So well did the vehicle perform through the flight that it was, in some ways, mundane; milestones came and went without a hitch, with only the launch and re-entry / splashdown forming points of drama / excitement. But really, that’s the whole point; problems aren’t what you need on a space mission. Let Hollywood play with them, but leave them out of the real thing.

Following launch, the vehicle rapidly climbed to orbit, the Delta launch vehicle’s two side boosters dropping away after the first few minutes of the flight to leave the core booster to get the vehicle to its initial height. Separation of the upper stage, complete with the “dummy” Service Module and Orion capsule then occurred, follow by the jettisoning of the fairings covering what would normally be the Service Module, and the ejection of the Launch Abort System (which, in a real mission, would automatically pull the capsule, which it enshrouds during launch, away from the main rocket the millisecond a serious anomaly in the rocket’s flight status is detected).

Passing through the Van Allen radiation belts – a critical test for the vehicle’s radiation protection and its electronics – Orion rose to a height of over 5,800 km above the Earth prior to separating from the Delta upper stage and “dummy” Service Module to start its return to Earth under its own power. This allowed mission planners to test the vehicle’s propulsion systems, which also functioned perfectly and with a greater degree of accuracy than had been expected.

Indeed, the only “failures” encountered with the flight, were the loss of the parachute bay cover – a section of the spacecraft which protects Orion’s parachute systems, and which is jettisoned for later recovery following re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere – and the first set of drogue ‘chutes deployed. Following splash down, it was discovered that one of the 35-6 metre diameter main parachutes had sunk before it could be recovered, and one of the five floatation devices used to right the craft should it land inverted in the water (it didn’t), had failed to inflate.  All of these are really minimal loses when compared to the overall success of the flight.

There will now be a three-year pause in Orion flights. This will allow the first Service Module to be built and delivered to NASA by the European Space Agency and, more particularly, allow NASA to complete the construction of the first in its new generation of launch vehicles, a rocket simply referred to as the Space Launch System.

Even so, and as I recently blogged, Orion EFT-1 marks the first step in what will hopefully, political will allowing, be a new era in the exploration of our solar system. As such, and despite more than fifty years having passed since the first man orbited the Earth, it is fair to say that where space flight is concerned, the human adventure is just beginning.