Next stop Mars as Britain rejoins space race
For the first time since ill-fated Beagle expedition, UK is sending up probe in attempt to find life
BRITAIN is heading back to Mars for the first time since the ill-fated Beagle 2 mission, joining the European Space Agency (ESA) in the race to find life on the Red Planet.
On March 14 the Exo-Mars orbiter and probe will blast off from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, for a seven-month journey, arriving on Mars in October.
The probe is carrying an array of British instruments, tuned to hunt for methane gas emissions which could signal the presence of life forms. It will be followed in two years’ time by a rover which is being built by Airbus in Hertfordshire.
British-built Beagle 2 was the last attempt the UK made at finding life on Mars. The probe, championed by the Open University scientist Colin Pillinger, was supposed to touch down on Christmas Day 2003, but lost contact with controllers and was not seen again until last year, when it was spotted by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Since then the UK has kept largely out of the space race, but the former science minister David Willetts pushed hard for increased investment and now Britain has its first astronaut in the International Space Station and will play a pivotal role in the ExoMars mission, in which the Government has invested more than £47 million.
Mars is thought to be scientists’ best chance of finding evidence of extra-terrestrial life because it once had running water and an atmosphere.
The hope of discovering life was raised in December 2014 when intriguing “burps” of methane were recorded by Nasa’s Curiosity Rover. On Earth, around 90 per cent of methane is produced by living organisms, so the expectation is that some kind of life is also emitting the gas on Mars.
Microbial life on earth has been found more than one mile beneath the surface of the Witwatersrand basin in South Africa so scientists are sure microbes could survive below the permafrost layer on Mars.
ExoMars Project Scientist Jorge Vago believes that the mission is the best hope of finding alien life.
“If there was ever a mission which had a good chance of making a discovery regarding possible life on Mars then ExoMars is it,” said Dr Vago.
“What we are looking for are patterns and repetitions of methane production which seem to be coming from living sources, rather than volcanic activity.
“If there is life on Mars today it will not be anywhere close to the surface. But if you drill for oil in the North Sea and go down a couple of kilometres you will find all kinds of little beasties.”
The probe is named Schiaparelli, after the 19th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli who observed straight-lined “canals” on Mars, which sparked speculation that they had been built by advanced civilisations.
Schiaparelli will be ejected from the orbiter and enter Mars’s atmosphere at 13,000mph, before deploying a thruster brake and parachute to glide down to the surface without much of a bump. It is bound for an area called Meridiani Planum, a plain located two degrees south of Mars’s equator, where scientists know water must have once flowed because of the presence of the crystal jarosite, which can only grow in water.
Once there, it will deploy a range of instruments, many designed by Oxford University, to start measuring humidity, pressure and temperature.
Above the surface, the ExoMars Orbiter will go into a circular orbit 250 miles up, where it will use an instrument designed by the Open University to measure methane in the atmosphere and determine if they have a biological or geological origin. It is eight times more powerful than Nasa’s Odyssey spacecraft currently orbiting Mars.
In May 2018, the hi-tech rover will be launched, touching down in January 2019. Using a six-and-a-half-foot drill, it will extract samples from under the surface of Mars and analyse them for signs of life. Nasa rovers can only currently drill two inches. The rover’s experiments and equipment have been designed by University College London, the University of Aberystwyth, Birkbeck College, Bradford University and the University of Leicester. ExoMars is a joint project between ESA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.