BRITAIN: Scientists are toying with the possibility that their missing baby, Beagle 2, might have tumbled down the slopes of an impact crater on Mars.
The region of Isidis Planitia, just north of the Martian equator, was selected as a landing site because it seemed to offer a compromise between safety and interesting geology in the search for life. But a high-resolution satellite image of the final target area has revealed a 1km-wide crater in the centre.
Long before the June launch, scientists had selected a 480km by 300km area as the landing site. But only after Beagle had been launched from the mothership Mars Express on December 19th could the mission controllers narrow this down to an area 70km long and 10km wide.
By yesterday they had their first satellite picture of the landing strip, taken by an older Nasa spacecraft, Mars Global Surveyor, 20 minutes after Beagle should have landed.
"Right at the centre of the ellipse that we were aiming at is a 1km crater," said Prof Colin Pillinger, the lead scientist on the mission. "We'd have to be incredibly accurate and also incredibly unlucky if it went down this crater. Which of course would not be good news.
"One would not want to go into a crater; one would not want to bounce around it. There is going to be impact debris around it - which means more rocks - and if we get to the bottom of a crater we reduce our attempts to be able to signal out of it." Prof Pillinger put the probability of landing in the crater at "a little more than one in 200".
Radio telescopes in Manchester, the Netherlands and California have listened, without success, for the faint squeak of its signal, and mission controllers at Leicester space centre have been trying to talk to their tiny truant Beagle - a package of state-of-the-art instruments in a container the size of a home barbecue - across 100 million miles of space.