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Europe is on the fast track to Mars with a boxy little probe and a Martian lander named after a ship that was named after a dog.

If all goes well, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its Mars Express spacecraft on June 2, carrying with it the Beagle 2 lander and Europe's hopes of finding water and evidence of life on another world.

Riding on the Mars Express

After deciding four years ago to shoot for Mars in 2003, when the transit time of a craft would be relatively short, ESA scientists began a rush to create a spacecraft that would provide the most bang for the Euro.

The cube-shaped Mars Express probe measures about 6 feet (1.8 meters) at its widest point, stands a few inches shorter and weighs 2600 lbs. (1,180 kilograms) in all. More than half of the orbiter's seven instruments have been pulled or modified from experiments aboard previous missions, cutting down the craft's cost and - more importantly - the time it took to get the probe ready.

"It's been a bloody fast mission," said Mars Express project manager Rudi Schmidt during a telephone interview. "But in hindsight, the work went surprisingly smooth. The next step, of course, is to get it operating as smoothly up in orbit."

Mars Express will launch from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome and take about seven months to reach the planet. ESA scientists expect the craft to enter Mars orbit sometime around December 26.

"It was a challenge just to put this mission together, and I think our science community has demonstrated that we can do it," said Gerhard Schwehm, head of ESA's Planetary Missions Division for the ESA.

Schwehm told SPACE.com that in Europe, it sometimes takes much longer to put together planetary missions than in the United States. Principal investigators are often scattered throughout Europe, as are the industrial groups tasked to build the craft.

"These are missions that can sometimes take up to 11 years to put together," Schwehm said.

Watching Mars from above

The Mars Express orbiter is expected sweep around the planet every 6.7 hours, coming within 155 miles (250 kilometers) at its closest point during its mapping mission. European researchers hope the seven instruments aboard the craft will provide final proof of water on Mars, thought by many to be the main requirement for the existence of life on the planet.

To do this, the orbiter carries MARSIS, a type of radar that uses low-frequency radio waves to seek out underground caches of water suggested by NASA (news - web sites)'s Mars Odyssey mission. A Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) should provide the most accurate measure of Martian water vapor to date, while researchers use a tool called ASPERA to analyze how solar wind may have worn down Mars' atmosphere to the point that the planet's water simply escaped into space as gas.

"This is a very complex piece of machinery, very integrated," said Schwehm of Mars Express, adding that the mission's experiment teams faced pressure to get all the instruments completed on time. "But I think we have a chance to do some great science."

The craft's high-resolution color images should be able to resolve objects on Mars more than six feet (two meters) wide, meaning it should be able to detect the Beagle 2 lander, and generate a complete geological map of the planet. Other experiments include the use of radio waves and a spectrometer called SPICAM to study the Martian atmosphere, the OMEGA infrared spectrometer to map the surface composition.

Mars Express researchers expect their orbiter to fly for about two Martian years but have included enough maneuvering fuel to last an additional two years. One Martian year is the equivalent of 687 Earth days.

Pawing for life with Beagle 2

But circling Mars from space isn't enough for some European scientists hoping to find out once and for all whether life existed on Mars. For that, researchers in the United Kingdom came up with Beagle 2 to land on the red planet and study Martian soil and rock for evidence of water and life.

After a fiery plunge through Mars' thin atmosphere, the Beagle 2 will deploy a parachute to slow its descent, and finally inflate gas-filled bags to cushion its landing. A quintet of solar panels should power the probe as it explores Isidis Planitia, a flat basin that scientists believe was once flooded and may now contain traces of life preserved in the rock.

"The primary question here is can we discover whether there is, or was, life on Mars," said Colin Pillinger, lead scientist for Beagle 2. "The experiments on Beagle 2 are the optimum suite of instruments to do this."

The lander will use a robotic arm with a PAW, short for Position Adjustable Workbench, to collect soil and rock samples and deposit them into 12 ovens aboard Beagle 2, where the material will be slowly cooked in an oxygen environment by the lander's Gas Analysis Package.
Pillinger and his Beagle 2 colleagues hope to measure two different types of carbon, carbon-12 and carbon-13, in this process to determine Mars has ever been home to living organisms. The experiment is based on Earth biology, where organisms tend to have more carbon-12 than carbon-13. Rocks seen with this ratio have been used as evidence that life existed on Earth four billion years ago, and researchers hope to find the same type of thing on Mars.

Beagle 2's PAW also carries a miniature geology lab at its tip. It includes two stereo cameras to snap images of the landing site, a grinder tool to drill up to 1 centimeter into rocks and take rock samples, as well as an attached microscope to pore over the newly exposed material.

A pair of spectrometers -- one Mössbauer and one x-ray -- will study the mineral and elemental composition of rocks. Meanwhile, a tethered mole called PLUTO -- short of Planetary Underground Tool -- will tunnel to a maximum depth of five feet (1.5 meters) and collect soil samples destined for Beagle 2's ovens.

"We have the capability of analyzing 12 solid samples, and we can keep the lander going as long as we have power," Pillinger said. Dust build-up can obstruct solar panels on Mars and eventually affect the amount of power the craft can provide itself. "The availability of power will be what kills it at the end of the day."

Beagle 2 takes its name from the HMS Beagle, a seafaring ship that carried scientist Charles Darwin around the world during the 1830s on a survey mission that ultimately led to a new understanding of the evolution of life on Earth. Like its counterpart, Beagle 2 will carry on the search for new life - if not new civilizations.
An ode to Mars '96 and cheap space missions
The Mars Express mission also gives ESA scientists a chance to recoup at least some of the losses suffered seven years ago, when the Russian-led Mars '96 probe failed to escape the Earth's gravitational pull. That mission was set to take two landers and 24 instruments, many of them European, to Mars but ultimately crashed into the Pacific Ocean four hours after launch.

"A lot of these [Mars Express] instruments come from Mars '96, which unfortunately didn't work out too well for us," Schwehm said.

The orbiter's high resolution camera system and three spectrometers, OMEGA, PFS and SPICAM, were originally developed for Mars '96, researchers said, although they were updated with better sensors and some additional electronics to integrate them into the current craft.
Schmidt told SPACE.com, that his project's final cost is estimated to be around 300 million Euros, about $346 million in U.S. currency. For comparison, NASA's 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission, with sent a lander and small Sojourner rover to the red planet cost about $265 million.

"I think the price is below the floor of anything we've done like it," Schmidt said.

Mars Express also represents a new tack in Europe's planetary exploration to develop not just one mission, but whole group stemming from an initial spacecraft. "We want to be able to implement a family of missions," Schwehm said. "It saves money and even more time."
Plans are already underway at ESA to develop an express mission to Venus on the heels of the current Mars mission. That mission, ESA scientists said, is expected to launch sometime in 2005, even faster than Mars Express.

"For me, it was clear that Mars Express would have a descendant," Schmidt said, adding that Venus Express should borrow at least two-thirds of its instrumentation from what is riding on it Mars-bound parent.

The Martian showdown

Mars Express is set to arrive at its destination about a week before the first of NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers, expected to land in early January 2004 and start roaming about the place. The Japanese probe Nozomi is also due to arrive at Mars in January to study the planet's atmosphere and weather, after suffering debilitating propulsion and communication problems.

The flood of craft aimed at Mars has given rise to some competition between the projects, but deciding who actually comes first with a discovery could be difficult. While it is a European Mission, Mars Express also includes work by NASA researches on instruments like the MARSIS radar and Beagle 2. Meanwhile, Mars Express researchers running the ASPERA instrument also have an instrument aboard Nozomi, an ion mass analyzer, and are collaborating there as well.

"It's a very healthy kind of competition," Schwehm said. "But it's clear that this is such an exciting field, and you always want to be there first

Europe's Mars Express Should Reach Red Planet By Jan. 2004