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.

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