Search the site








Life on Mars                                                                                 January 2004

Beagle bungles but Mars Rover beams back pics to the Net

While British planetary scientists have lamented the failure of Beagle 2 to phone home, NASA's Mars Rover has demonstrated that there's plenty of life on the Net.

The first of the Mars Exploration Rovers landed on January 3, loaded with panoramic cameras, spectrometers (to determine the chemical composition of rocks and soil) and other tools to collect, analyse and image samples taken from the dusty surface of the planet.

While Beagle was designed to search for traces of life on Mars, the main objective of Mars Rover is to assess whether the fourth planet from the sun was ever capable of sustaining surface water. Although it is now barren desert, images from new devices such as the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Program have returned pictures of Mars's surface that could indicate rivers and other large bodies of water.

NASA has uploaded images from the first Mars Rover, called Spirit, onto its web site. As well as images from the descent and landing from the Rover, cameras attached to each side of the craft are beaming back signals that are uploaded regularly to the site. At the time of writing, Spirit is calibrating its instruments before it continues its mission, which amateur scientists will be able to follow online.

Previous stories

Relevant sites

Mars Rover
Beagle 2



© Jason Whittaker 2000-02



You can order copies of the following books:
Web Production for Writers and Journalists in paperback.
The Internet: The Basics in paperback.
The Cyberspace Handbook in paperback.