European hopes rest on budget Beagle

By CATHERINE FIELD Herald correspondent

PARIS - Western Europe will be putting its reputation for high technology on the line next week when it begins a race with the United States to confirm whether the stuff of life exists on Mars.

Early Tuesday (New Zealand time), a Russian rocket is due to blast off from Kazakhstan, taking with it Europe's first solo mission to the Red Planet and the hopes of the space science community, on whom tens of billions of dollars have been lavished in the goal of making the continent a space power.

After reaching orbit, the Soyuz launcher will release its precious payload: Mars Express, an unmanned spacecraft that for the next six months will race across 400 million km of void.

Then, a few days before Christmas, with its camera eyes and radar fingers greedily scanning the planet, the spacecraft will release a bizarre-looking, British-built explorer, Beagle II, which will drift down to the planet's surface and open out like a clamshell.

A stationary miniature laboratory, Beagle II will conduct an array of experiments focussing on the biggest one of all: is there, or has there ever been, water on Mars?

"This is a device which is built to try and answer a very fundamental question," says Colin Pillinger, the scientist behind Beagle II.

"Is there life elsewhere in the solar system and, more importantly, is this the step towards knowing whether we are alone in the universe?"

Once thought to be arid and with no potential for life, Mars has inflamed scientific curiosity in recent years with the evidence that water ice exists on its thin polar cap and that, just maybe, vast quantities could lurk below the surface.

For that reason, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) have flung themselves into a race to be the first to find out, using the unusually close proximity of Mars this year to reduce the flight time as much as possible.

If Mars Express' liftoff is delayed, that will give a crucial advantage to Nasa, which is planning two missions, each using a fancy robot that will crawl across the Martian soil, picking up and analysing soil samples. The first rover is due to lift off on June 8, with the second due to follow on June 25.

Europe is desperate for good news in what, so far, has been an annus horribilis for its space programme, troubled by technical failures and a disastrous slump in revenue from the satellite launch market.

ESA is struggling to restore faith in its Ariane-5 rocket after a disastrous launch failure in December that cost nearly $860 million in two lost satellites and mothballed an ambitious comet-chasing spacecraft which has cost nearly $1.3 billion to design and build.

Yesterday, ESA ministers agreed to a $2.47 billion package to save Ariane-5.

Doubts linger over whether the International Space Station will be completed and fulfil the dream of a building a full-fledged manned laboratory in orbit.

Tightening budget constraints over the years mean the Mars project has been completed on a shoestring.

Beagle II - named in honour of the ship that took Charles Darwin, the author of On The Origin of Species, on his voyage of discovery - is being portrayed as a triumph of British guts, ingenuity and make-do.

Money was so tight that at one point Pillinger was reputedly tempted to put sponsorship stickers on the lander (a large chocolate company was said to be lined up).

He has stirred a blaze of media interest in it by getting the avant-garde artist Damien Hirst to do a colour test card for the Beagle's cameras, while the pop group Blur have provided a theme tune, reminiscent of the Dr Who music which the lander will play every time it radios home.

Space race

* The 15 members of the European Space Agency will inject €1.2 billion ($2.47 billion) into rocket launcher Arianespace over six years.

* ESA budgeted €228 million for the Ariane-5 rocket programme.

* ESA member countries agreed to move forward with the Galileo global satellite navigation system, ending months of delay and controversy.

* The €3.2 billion programme, Europe's answer to the Global Positioning System put in place by the United States military, is to place 30 satellites in orbit by 2008.