Engineering news
A British spacecraft which disappeared as it approached Mars in search of life has been spotted on the planet's surface, the head of the UK Space Agency has confirmed.
The Beagle 2 probe has not been seen or heard from since December 2003 and had been presumed destroyed.
However, UK Space Agency chief executive David Parker said that high-resolution pictures taken by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft showed it actually successfully landed 12 years ago.
Dr Parker said: "This finding makes the case that Beagle 2 was more of a success than we previously knew and undoubtedly an important step in Europe's continuing exploration of Mars."
Parker said: "What we can say with some confidence today is that Beagle 2 is no longer lost and furthermore it seems we are not looking at a crash site.
"We have good evidence of Beagle 2 resting on the surface of Mars.
"These images are consistent with the Beagle 2 having successfully landed on Mars but then only partially deploying itself."
The agency said the images "identified clear evidence for the lander and convincing evidence for key entry and descent components on the surface of Mars".
Professor Mark Sims of the University of Leicester, who was an integral part of the Beagle 2 project, said: "To be frank, I had all but given up hope of ever knowing what happened to Beagle 2. The images show that we came so close to achieving the goal of science on Mars. The images vindicate the hard work put in by many people and companies both here in the UK and around Europe and the world in building Beagle 2.
"The highly-complex entry, descent and landing sequence seems to have worked perfectly and only during the final phases of deployment did Beagle 2 unfortunately run into problems. I view it as a great achievement that the team built Beagle 2 in a little over four years and successfully landed it on the surface of Mars.
"It was a great pity we couldn't have delivered the world-class science Beagle 2 may have brought and even sadder that Colin (Pillinger) and other colleagues who died in 2014 didn't live to see the discovery that Beagle 2 made it to Mars."
The lander was shaped like an old-fashioned pocket watch with leaf-like panels, which failed to fully open when it landed, either because of a mechanical fault or because a landing airbag got stuck around it. Without all four open, it could not communicate with Earth.
Dr John Bridges, of the University of Leicester, said the Reconnaissance Lander's HiRISE camera spotted the lander from 185 miles above Mars, just three miles from its intended landing site. It found three objects, believed to be the lander and its landing equipment.
They "glinted" in the sun but cast no shadow, he said, adding: "This is not just a pile of rocks and sand on the Martian surface. This is an alien object, a man-made object."
Beagle 2 was largely funded by private donations and money raised by promotional campaigns led by the late Prof Pillinger.
The probe was carried by the Mars Express spacecraft, which was blasted into space by a Russian rocket from Kazakhstan in June 2003.
It was scheduled to put down in a near-equatorial region of Mars known as Isidis Planitia on December 26. But after detaching from the Mars Express and heading for the surface, it was not heard from again.