WHAT happened to the UK’s Beagle 2 Mars probe on Christmas Day 2003 is once more unclear.
In December 2008, engineers led by Madhat Abdel-Jawad at the University of Queensland thought they had cracked it when their simulations showed Beagle 2’s gyroscopic spin was too fast for it to remain stable – so it would have tumbled and burned up in the Martian atmosphere (New Scientist, 20 December 2008, p 24).
The Beagle 2 team is far from convinced. Arthur Smith of Fluid Gravity Engineering in Emsworth, Hampshire, UK, says the Australian team failed to simulate atmospheric entry in a…
