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<b>Beagle 2 Bites Back</b><br /><br /><i>Mars lander team answers its critics</i><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />The Beagle 2 mission team has released its own report about what went wrong with the ill-fated Mars lander. The European Space Agency (ESA) reviewed the mission earlier this year and blamed poor management of funds for the failure. But the UK team concludes that the most likely cause of Beagle 2's demise was the fact that the planet's atmosphere turned out to be thinner than expected, so the craft was unable to brake hard enough to land safely.<br /><br />Reconstructing Beagle 2's last moments is not an easy task. The 40-million (US$72-million) lander was designed to open like a pocket watch once it reached the martian surface, then deploy an antenna to beam news of its safe arrival back to Earth. But no signal was heard from the craft after its separation from the mother ship Mars Express on 19 December 2003, and satellites orbiting the planet have so far failed to spot debris from any crash.<br /><br />So the Beagle 2 team, led by mission manager Mark Sims of the University of Leicester and including collaborators from the Open University in Milton Keynes and engineering firm EADS Astrium, reviewed the craft's pre-launch test results to work out what went wrong.<br /><br />The team rules out two main theories for the loss of Beagle 2: they conclude that there is no reason to suspect that the main parachute failed to deploy, or that the craft's protective heat shield collided with the lander after separation.<br /><br />It points out that after Beagle 2 had detached from Mars Express, the orbiting craft detected that the martian atmosphere was much thinner than expected. This means the lander may not have been able to brake sufficiently during its descent.<br /><br />But the team also admits that failure of the airbags cannot be ruled out, and concedes that airbag tests were "less in numbe