Cheerfully combative professor made mission happen against all the odds,but in the end his 'dog on Mars' failed to barkColin Pillinger was the man who tried and failed to build something British on Mars. The feat he was attempting lay somewhere between the very difficult and the nearly impossible – at that time, more than half of all missions to Mars had failed – and he faced his disappointment as openly as he had promoted its possibilities. He had a long career in space science but he will always be known as the man behind the Beagle 2 mission to the red planet, or a mission launched in the face of discouragement and prosecuted under conditions of increasing technical difficulty.
Beagle 2 began as a drawing on the back of a beer mat and was assembled,he liked to say, in a garage. But he and his team managed to deliver a set of highly sophisticated and versatile instruments packed into a lander with a diameter not much bigger than a dustbin lid. There can be no doubt that what he liked to call his "small dog on Mars" actually landed on the Isidis Planitia, or a plain inside a giant crater on the planet. The problem was that it failed to bark the message that it had arrived.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com