Has Missing Beagle 2 Been Found On Mars?

On Christmas Day 2003, Beagle 2 was supposed to send a signal from the surface of Mars. That signal never came. Two months later, the British spacecraft was declared lost.

Now it may be found. At a press conference today, the UK Space Agency will give an update on the mission, more than a decade after it launched.

Beagle 2 is part of the pantheon of glorious British failures. Its instigator, Colin Pillinger, who died last year, was an eccentric and brilliant space scientist.

But while it may have started as a sketch on a beer mat, and met a red dusty fate, Beagle 2 was a big technological achievement.

According to a NASA report it was "an ambitious, risky mission, driven by the possibility of outstanding scientific return value".

First, the speed with which it was built.

Development started in 2000. Three years later, Beagle 2 was perched on top of a Soyuz-Fregat rocket, hurtling towards Mars - part of the first European mission to the planet. The parachute supposed to deliver Beagle 2 safely to the surface was developed in only 15 weeks.

That speed may have compromised the mission - Beagle 2's development was rushed to meet a launch window in which Mars and Earth would be the closest they had been for 60,000 years. Testing by the European Space Agency was extremely limited. And the UK government failed to contribute enough funds at the start of the project.

In spite of everything, that money, £25m, was well spent.

The Beagle 2 was a triumph of miniaturisation. The experimental equipment on board weighed less than 9kg and consumed only 40W of power - a model of efficiency adopted (and then improved on) by subsequent Mars Lander.

And its tiny Gas Analysis Package found a potential application here on earth - for diagnosing Tuberculosis. Its lab-on-a-chip technologies were equally applicable.

Similar technologies will find their way into the planned ExoMars Rover, due to launch in 2018. Beagle 2 was the "baseline design" for its arm.

The wreckage of Beagle 2 will tell us more about exactly what went wrong with its landing, but its contribution did not end when it crashed.