- LONDON (Reuters) - A British
mission trying to find life on Mars accepted on Saturday its space probe
may have crashed but remained hopeful despite failing for a third day to
detect a signal.
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- The failure to pick up a message from Beagle 2 has raised
fears that the probe, no bigger than an open umbrella, may have suffered
the same fate as so many craft before it and ended up as scrap metal strewn
across the bleak Martian landscape.
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- "There are scenarios where we may have lost Beagle
2 if the landing system didn't work as expected," Professor Alan Wells,
one of the project's scientists, told Sky News.
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- Attempts in the last 24 hours by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter
and the Lovell Telescope at Britain's Jodrell Bank Observatory had both
failed to detect Beagle 2, scientists said.
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- Wells said they had now set up two teams, one to keep
trying to communicate with the probe and a "Tiger Team" to investigate
why it had not responded as expected on Christmas Day.
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- "We're far from giving up. We've only tried five
times so far," he said. "What we're doing is looking at any possibility
where Beagle 2 is still functioning and we're not able to communicate with
it for some reason."
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- Of the previous 11 probes dropped on the red planet's
surface, only three have survived and it is estimated that around two in
every three Russian and U.S. missions to Mars have been whole or partial
failures.
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- The $375 million Beagle 2 is the first fully European
mission to be sent to any planet and had been hailed as a triumph for British
ingenuity and for European space exploration.
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- European Space Agency (ESA) officials said on Friday
they were still optimistic of finding the probe. There are 13 further scheduled
transmissions before it goes into emergency auto-transmit mode.
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- Beagle 2's failure to make contact soured Christmas and
Boxing Day for scientists, who are trying to answer a question which has
fascinated mankind for generations -- "Is there life on Mars?"
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- They gathered in London on Thursday and Friday, hoping
to hear the probe broadcasting its signature tune -- composed for the occasion
by pop group Blur -- across the 62 million miles from Mars.
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- ESA officials said that even if Beagle 2 was not found,
the Mars Express mother craft that carried the 75-pound probe had successfully
been guided on to an orbit around Mars from where it would study the planet
for two years.
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- "For the scientists here the orbiter is the most
important part of the mission," said Gerhard Schwehm, an ESA planetary
mission official. "The landing probe on Mars is in essence the icing
on the cake."
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