No answer yet :( At least the Mars Express orbiter seems to be where it's supposed to be. Keep your fingers crossed for Beagle.
udate: More information. It looks like the first opportunity, an Odyssey flyover, didn't pick up Beagle's signal but that doesn't mean that Beagle's lost. It sounds like the next opportunity to get Beagle's signal will be mid-day (USA time) Thursday.
update2: Reuters has a much less optimistic headline but based on their obvious failure to understand basics like which crafts were actually involved, I'm holding out hope that they're just clueless.
update3: more: "I'm afraid it's a bit disappointing but it's not the end of the world," Pillinger told the press. "Please don't go away from here believing we've lost the spacecraft."
There was a further chance later Thursday, from 2200 GMT onwards, that the British radio telescope Jodrell Bank might pick up a signal, and also an opportunity on Friday, before Beagle's batteries failed, he said.
update4: more quotes from the AP, "We have had the information from Odyssey and it does not contain any data from Beagle," said Peter Barratt, a spokesman for the Beagle 2 mission in London. However, he added, "we are quite confident" that the landing will still be confirmed.
last update of the night: Quite a few online papers have picked up a line that goes something like this: "Two-thirds of all of the Mars missions have ended in failure." This is intentionally misleading, sensationalist, and just really lame reporting. Take out the Soviet and Russian Mars missions (which have pretty much all failed) and you've got just the opposite, something closer to two-thirds success, for NASA missions. Mars Express and Beagle 2 are a joint British/ESA production and I'd put them a whole lot closer to NASA in competence than to Russia. I've still got my fingers crossed :-) More tomorrow as it comes in.
Posted by asa at December 24, 2003 10:51 PM