Plaques unveiled across the UK celebrate Beagle 2, the country’s first spacecraft to reach Mars.
A series of plaques has been unveiled across the UK to mark the country’s first spacecraft to reach another planet. The mission was the creation of Professor Colin Pillinger, a scientist born in Kingswood near Bristol who completed his degree at Swansea University.
Before spearheading the Mars project, Pillinger gained international recognition for his lunar research. He later moved to Cambridge University to analyze meteorites found in Antarctica that were believed to originate from Mars. During the 1980s, he helped establish the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at The Open University in Milton Keynes, where he developed the concept of dispatching a lander to investigate the red planet firsthand for biosignatures. His wife named the spacecraft Beagle 2.
Hitching a Ride to Mars With Blur and Damien Hirst
Because Britain lacked a dedicated space agency to rival international superpowers and Nasa, Pillinger proposed hitching a ride aboard Mars Express, a European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft scheduled to travel to the planet. The ESA approved the ride in 1999 but did not guarantee funding or wider support for the project. To attract financial backing, Pillinger set out to capture the public’s imagination.
Pillinger also enlisted cultural heavyweights, persuading the Britpop band Blur to compose a distinctive call-sign for the lander to transmit to Earth after landing. A spot painting was produced by artist Damien Hirst to function as a calibration target for the camera on board the lander. Built for about £50m—in contrast to the $25bn Nasa spent on the Apollo program during the 1960s—the project eventually won financial support from the UK government, academic institutions, industrial contractors, and private sponsors.
Christmas Day Silence and the Discovery of the Silent Lander
Mars Express launched on June 2, 2003, with Beagle 2 aboard, scheduled to reach Mars on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, scientists and celebrities gathered at The Open University’s London headquarters. Members of Blur drank mulled wine, and singer Myleene Klass handed out jelly babies as the crowd waited for confirmation that the lander had touched down safely. The signal never came. Pillinger and his team believed the craft had descended too quickly after encountering Martian atmospheric conditions, and official inquiries by the government and the ESA later criticized the project’s finances and management structure.
Pillinger died in May 2014 after a brain haemorrhage and coma, believing the lander had not safely landed. Eight months later, high-resolution images captured by Nasa revealed the largely intact Beagle 2 sitting in the red dust just 5km from its intended landing site. The images confirmed that much of its landing sequence had worked, with parachutes and cushioning airbags deploying as planned. However, its petal-like solar panels failed to open fully, trapping the antenna and preventing the craft from communicating.
