The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

262 Mars Express
Mars Express
(continued from page 259)
with some heritage from European instruments lost on
the ill-fated Mars 96, as well as a communications package
to support Mars lander missions from 2003 to 2007.
Beagle 2
The miniature lander to be carried aboard Mars Express.
It is dedicated to looking for traces of life and conducting
geochemical analyses, and is named after the ship in
which Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos. Changes
in the mission specification meant that the mass of Beagle
2 had to be trimmed from 90 kg to 60 kg, echoing
economies that proved necessary on the original Beagle.
(So cramped was that ship that a padre had to give up his
berth so that Darwin could go.)
Once it has safely reached the surface by a combination
of aeroshell, parachutes, and air bags, Beagle 2 will
deploy a battery of ingenious, tiny instruments. These
include a “mole” that can burrow along or through soil
and collect samples for analysis by a mass spectrometer.
The mole is placed on the surface by a robotic arm and
can be pulled back into its storage tube aboard the lander
by means of an attached cable. To expose fresh material
from inside rocks, Beagle 2 also carries a modified dentist’s
drill. Samples will be subjected to “stepped combustion”—heated
to successively higher temperatures—and
then analyzed. An elevated ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-
13 would be interesting, because living things preferentially
use the lighter form of carbon. Beagle 2 will also
Mars Express The Beagle lander with its solar panels outspread
and its instrument arm deployed. All rights reserved Beagle 2
sniff the atmosphere for tiny amounts of methane, which
would suggest that there might be microbes alive today
on Mars.
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS)
A NASA orbiter launched in November 1996 and
designed to investigate, over the course of a full Martian
year, the surface, atmosphere, and magnetic properties of
Mars in unprecedented detail. It is the inaugural mission
in a decade of planned intensive in situ research of the
Red Planet and also a replacement mission to achieve
most of the goals of the failed Mars Observer. It has
been so successful that its operation has been extended
until late 2004. During this bonus phase, MGS will help
scout landing sites for the Mars Exploration Rovers.
MGS carries four main science instruments. The Mars
Orbiter Camera provides daily wide-angle images of Mars
similar to weather photos of Earth and narrow-angle
images of objects as small as 1.5 m across. The Mars
Orbiter Laser Altimeter bounces a laser beam off the surface
to measure accurately the height of mountains and
the depth of valleys. The Thermal Emission Spectrometer
scans emitted heat to study both the atmosphere and the
mineral composition of the surface. Finally, the Magnetometer
and Electron Reflection experiment provides data
on the magnetic state of the crustal rocks, which in turn
sheds light on the early magnetic history of the planet.
Launch
Date: November 7, 1996
Vehicle: Delta 7925
Site: Cape Canaveral
Mars, manned missions
For most of the twentieth century, humans dreamed of
traveling to Mars and there has been no shortage of
plans, proposals, and statements of intent to make the
dream a reality. The first detailed study of a manned Mars
mission appeared in Wernher von Braun’s book The
Mars Project, published in 1952. Von Braun proposed flying
10 spacecraft, each with a crew of 70, in convoy to
Mars. Fifty of the astronauts would land on the Red
Planet and stay there for a year before returning to Earth.
By 1956, in The Exploration of Mars, written in collaboration
with Willy Ley, von Braun had scaled back the mission
to a dozen crew members and two spacecraft: a
winged glider (carrying a small ascent rocket) that would
land on Mars, and a mother ship in orbit that would be
used for the return home.
During the early years of the Apollo program, Mars
was seen as the next obvious, and not too distant, step. A
variety of studies appeared, including a proposal by Ernst