Professor Colin Pillinger has spent much of the last two years championing the Beagle 2 project, the British-led effort to land on Mars to seek evidence for past and present life.
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The motivation for Beagle 2 comes from a number of discoveries concerning Martian meteorites by Professor Pillinger and his group during the last fifteen years. Thus they were the first to recognise the major component of the Martian atmosphere, carbon dioxide, trapped in meteoritic glass (1985) and measure its isotopic composition, key information in establishing the provenance of the rocks. Oxygen isotopic information (1989) from the group demonstrates there are now nearly twenty Martian samples on Earth. Pillinger et al detected the presence of carbonates and demonstrated they had been formed on Mars (1988) by water solutions of atmospheric carbon dioxide at low temperature (1994). A most important discovery, attracting over forty press calls in a day was the announcement of indigenous organic matter in meteorites (1989) with the connotations that this has for life on Mars. Later work was concentrated on efforts to demonstrate that the organic matter was not terrestrial contamination (1998) because it has been recognised that the main rock involved was very young in age and thus the life process (if that indeed was involved) and recent (1997). The culmination of these studies however must be the analysis of a Martian sample in situ on Mars, hence Beagle 2.
Beagle 2 is a 60 kg spacecraft named to honour the ship which carried Charles Darwin on the five year voyage of discovery which led to the writing of "On the Origin of Species". Beagle 2 which will be launched early June 2003 is expected to land shortly after Christmas 2003. A mass spectrometer on board designed and built by Professor Pillinger's team will investigate six criteria to reveal life processes have occurred on another planet, first step in answering the question "Are we alone in the Universe?"
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This Lecture has been organised by the Royal Aeronautical Society's Space Group and will be held in the Society's Lecture Theatre commencing at 18:00 hrs.
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