The European Space Agency formally abandoned attempts to contact Beagle 2, the British-built Mars lander that had gone silent immediately after its scheduled landing on December 25, 2003. Named after Darwin's HMS Beagle, the small lander was designed to search for signs of past or present life on Mars, and its disappearance was one of the enduring mysteries of Mars exploration until images finally located it a decade later.
Beagle 2 was the brainchild of British planetary scientist Colin Pillinger, a charismatic, mutton-chopped researcher who spent years persuading government and industry to fund a scrappy, low-cost mission to search for biological signatures on Mars. It piggybacked on ESA's Mars Express orbiter, separating and coasting to the surface with an experimental airbag and gas-bag landing system.
Mission controllers waited for a signal on Christmas morning 2003 that never came. Despite repeated attempts using orbiters from multiple space agencies over the following weeks, no contact was ever established, and on February 6, 2004, officials declared the mission lost, a bitter disappointment for the British space program which had never successfully landed a probe on another planet.
The mystery lingered until 2015, when NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter finally photographed Beagle 2 sitting intact on the Martian surface, its solar panels only partially deployed, which likely blocked its antenna from transmitting. Pillinger died in 2014, a year before the discovery, never learning what had gone wrong with the mission he had championed for nearly two decades.