Orbiter to look for lost-to-Mars probes

Resolution resolve
“MRO may hopefully resolve what happened to Beagle 2,” explained Mark Sims, the project’s mission manager at the Space Research Center’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

MRO has enough resolution to perhaps directly image the lander and certainly enough to image any debris or components, such as airbags and parachutes. That is, assuming that such gear is not covered by dust. Now, nearly three years after Beagle 2’s landing, hardware dusted over may no longer be recognizable, Sims told Space.com.

“We understand that the HiRISE team intends to image the Beagle 2 landing ellipse at some point in the mission,” Sims said. However, for obvious reasons, he added, doing so is not a high priority for MRO, given top-of-the-checklist need to image sites for Phoenix, Mars Science Laboratory and other future missions.

“We, however, look forward to what MRO might detect as it would be good to ascertain how close to a successful landing Beagle 2 came,” Sims noted.

Using MRO as a spotter scope for vanished Mars probes is on the schedule. But the spacecraft also totes another “eye spy” device for finding spacecraft gone astray.

Along with HiRISE, MRO’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM, is now up and operating too. It is able to identify minerals on the surface of Mars and is one of six science instruments aboard MRO. CRISM investigations are being led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

Spacecraft hard landings, like in the case for Beagle 2, can churn up a rather large area of soil in the process. CRISM might locate signs of different minerals in the upturned crash spot that don’t match those of the surrounding terrain.

JPL’s Zurek said that this kind of CRISM data would be like having a mineral fingerprint pointing to the spot where Beagle 2 plopped down.

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