A total contrast in atmosphere

By CAHAL MILMO in London

In California, there was champagne and celebration at another American conquest of the final frontier. In rainy Camden, there was only tea and sympathy to be had as British space scientists contemplated another day of interplanetary failure.

After a seven-month journey across 480 million km of nothingness, a six-wheeled Nasa robot the size of a golf buggy yesterday heralded a new chapter in humanity's exploration of the cosmos when it successfully bounced to a halt from a speed of 20,000 km/h and sent home startling pictures of Mars.

The images of the Red Planet transmitted from the Spirit rover were greeted with whoops of jubilation and glasses of bubbly in the control room of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the US$820 million ($1.2 billion) mission is being coordinated by the world's space superpower.


Meanwhile, some 8690km away in a north London lecture room crowded with observers sipping polystyrene cups of milky tea and nibbling Rich Tea biscuits, two of Britain's leading space experts put on brave faces as they explained why Beagle 2 - the £45 million ($122 million) British-built Mars probe which went missing on Christmas Day - remains obstinately silent.

The team had billed yesterday as their best opportunity yet for contacting the 65kg robot because its mother ship, the European Space Agency's Mars Express, would finally be in orbit over the proposed landing area.

But after days of unabashed optimism, Colin Pillinger, the project's lead scientist, said that a change in the Mars Express orbit patterns meant the fate of the probe would now not be known before Thursday. More than 20 other probes from America and other nations, including the Soviet Union, have been destroyed on similar missions.



The contrast between events in Camden and the Nasa control room just north of Los Angeles could not have been more complete or cruel.

Within three hours of executing what Nasa technicians said seemed to have been a flawless landing in its cocoon of inflatable bags designed - like Beagle 2 - to bounce to a halt on Mars, the Spirit rover had begun sending back the first of 60 to 80 images of the Gusev crater where it touched down.


The black and white pictures, akin to footage from a high-resolution security camera, showed a flat windswept plain peppered with rocks as well as a bird's eye of the probe itself with the solar panels that will power its explorations fully deployed.

Staff in Pasadena hugged and clapped each other on the back as the images started appearing on the banks of screens.

Nasa said Spirit's first colour images could be transmitted to Earth today, relayed by a second spacecraft in orbit around the Red Planet.


The American space agency intends to send further probes at 26-month intervals to carry out tasks including assessments of whether there is currently any life on the planet.

But this question, the ultimate mystery for humanity when it comes to Mars, would be answered even sooner if only the vastly smaller and cheaper cousin of the Nasa rovers suddenly sprung into action.

Beagle 2, which lurched through multiple technical and funding crises, has no ability to move about but carries a probe to detect methane, which could prove the existence of microscopic Martians.

- INDEPENDENT