It was an audacious plan when the Beagle 2 Lander hitched a lift to Mars on the back of European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express mission in June 2003. And the extraordinary role of Bristol engineers and scientists who dared to dream about landing on the Red Planet is told in the Journey to Mars Exhibition, which opened at Aerospace Bristol this week.
The exhibition display has a Beagle 2 model which is on a simulated Martian ‘groundscape’, as well as the Mars Express Orbiter model which carried the Beagle 2. Not far away, in front of Concorde at the attraction, is the 7-metre diameter Mars globe created by Bristol artist Luke Jerram, which shows surface detail across the planet using NASA images.
Beagle 2’s mission was to look for evidence of past life on Mars and it successfully landed on the red planet on Christmas Day in 2003 as planned. But it was lost on the surface for over a decade and only found when a high resolution on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the partially deployed Lander in 2015.
