A Martian glove compartment

Around Christmas next year a nine-note ditty played by pop group Blur will cut through 50 million miles of space confirming that a British-led mission has made it to Mars. In more ways than one it will be music to the ears of Professor Colin Pillinger, who for more than 25 years - since the Americans landed two robotic Viking spacecraft on Mars - has yearned for the opportunity to answer one of the most fascinating questions in astronomy.

"I suppose the Holy Grail for astronomers is explaining what happened in that half an eye blink before the universe began," says Professor Pillinger, who heads the Planetary and Science Research Institute at the Open University. "But the general public is far more interested in life on Mars."

More than 150 companies, universities and funding organisations have now chipped in to meet the £25 million cost of the Beagle 2 section of the European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express mission which will be launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan next May. Blur, who are keen on a British space programme, became interested after meeting Professor Pillinger and artist Damien Hirst is supplying a spot painting. School children have sent in their pound coins and pensioners have written to the team offering their tea-making services.

This is a startling achievement by Professor Pillinger who finally convinced the ESA to resume the search for alien life following more than a decade of indifference after the Viking pillaging of Mars had proved inconclusive.

"In 1997 I basically muscled in on an ESA meeting in Paris. I knew this would be a prime opportunity to convince them to look for life on the planet. Some of the members weren’t too pleased but they let me have my say and about a year later they told me to put my money where my mouth was and prove it - which was fantastic but at that stage I didn’t have a penny!"

Now, following an endless circuit of talking to interested parties, the cost of the venture has been underwritten and experimental tests are moving on at a rapid rate. The gold-finished lander, which is made from bullet-proof, kevlar-type material, has to be delivered to the ESA by next January for take-off the following May.

The Wellcome Trust recently joined the consortium by providing £2.6 million for the 31-valve mass spectrometer and 12-oven gas analysis package on board Beagle 2, which will land on a former sediment-filled crater on Isidis Planitia. This highly sophisticated ‘cooking kit’ will heat rock and soil samples at a range of temperatures both in a vacuum and with oxygen. The results will help scientists decide whether life has existed on Mars.

The spectrometer is one of the most vital pieces of equipment on board the bicycle-wheel-sized lander, which will weigh around 34 kg, because it will allow experiments to be conducted in situ - unlike a new NASA mission to the planet which will eventually return samples in 2014.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for the Open University team working on Beagle 2 has been to miniaturise the spectrometer. "A normal spectrometer is about half the size of a small room," says Professor Pillinger. "We’ve had to reduce it to something weighing around 5 kg. It’s a bit like reducing your family saloon to a glove compartment."

The knock-on earthly benefits of shrinking the spectrometer could allow a pocket-size version to be developed commercially, which would be invaluable for researchers. Mass spectrometers are widely used to analyse biological molecules, but are currently bulky, complex central resources. A mini-version, by contrast, could become a tool on every scientist’s bench.

As soon as the Beagle has landed, at 14.00 Martian time in the middle of spring, the clam-like lander will open so four solar panels can unfold. The operation is totally dependent on a lithium ion battery charged by solar energy, which will produce the equivalent power of a 100-watt light bulb burning for 90 minutes a day.

It will be several weeks before all the relevant information beams back to Earth but it is hoped the lander will be able to work for 180 days to test soil, rock and look for minor constituents in the atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide. Back on terra firma, scientists will be eagerly awaiting the results beamed back, perhaps able to say once and for all whether there has ever been life on Mars.

See also

• Press release (23 May 2002): New Boost in Hunt for Life on Mars

External links

• Beagle 2 project: Details about the British led effort to land on Mars as part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Mission in June 2003.
• Professor Colin Pillinger at the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute, Open University: Research interests