Whirlwind of Signals Expected from Mars
Dec. 15 -- The first thing controllers hope to hear as the earliest of three Mars probes touches down on the Red Planet on Christmas day is a nine-tone ditty by the British rock band, Blur. From that point on, Mars will only get noisier.
If all goes to plan, three probes will be exploring Mars' surface by the end of January and relaying everything they learn back to Earth directly or by way of two orbiters that are now zipping around the planet.
NASA is bracing for the communications crunch.
"From Christmas eve until the end of January we're going to be here around the clock," said Roger Gibbs, project manager for the Mars Odyssey orbiter at the Johnson Space Center, in Pasadena, Calif.
Singing Beagle 2
Mission planners for the European Space Agency's Beagle 2 lander solicited the craft's unique arrival tune as a way of drawing a little more attention to the Beagle's planned Christmas day landing on Mars.
"We have to announce our arrival and normally we send back some piece of gobbledygook but we wanted to have something that was instantly recognizable," Beagle 2's lead scientist Colin Pillinger told the BBC.
The Beagle may sing, but unlike the two NASA rovers that are due to touch down in January, it can't talk directly to receivers on Earth. Instead, it will relay all information through one of three orbiters.
Most of the Beagle's reports will arrive via the Mars Express — the European orbiter that's now heading toward the planet. But for the Beagle's first 10 days on Mars, NASA's Odyssey orbiter will do most of the listening as the Express reorients itself into a comfortable orbit.
Odyssey will then send Beagle's reports to one of three sites of giant listening dish stations posted in Spain, Australia and California, known collectively as the Deep Space Network (DSN).
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