LONDON: A 106 meter parachute drop from a balloon on Friday ended months of tension and cleared the way for a British landing on Mars.

Beagle 2 — a tiny package of experiments which could answer questions about life on the Red Planet — is the brainchild of Colin Pillinger of the UK’s Open University, and will be the first British spacecraft to complete a voyage to another part of the solar system. It will be launched on May 23 aboard a European mission called Mars Express, then separate from its mothership and touch down on the fourth rock from the sun on the night before Christmas Eve 2003 — just days ahead of two robot landers being prepared by the US space agency, Nasa.

But the challenge lies in the landing. In the last 40 years, there have been more than an 30 attempts to study Mars, and more than half have ended in failure. The parachute drop from a hot air balloon in Shropshire in the north west of England, was the climax of what had become, literally, a crash programme to make sure of a soft landing.

Beagle 2 will land with celebrity trappings. Its “call sign” back to Earth has been composed by Damon Albarn of the British rock band Blur. The colour calibration chart for its camera was designed by the British artist Damien Hirst.

The spacecraft — built by the European satellite giant Astrium — will arrive above Mars at more than 12,000 miles an hour but must bounce to a standstill in a cocoon of airbags with its delicate instrument package intact and ready to start probing the soil of the planet. Beagle 2 will separate from its mothership as the two vehicles reach Mars.

At about 1,500mph, a tiny mortar will fire a pilot parachute, the heat shield and rear cover will separate and fall away, and the pilot chute will drag open the new parachute ten metres across, but weighing only a fraction more than a kilogramme, to slow Beagle 2 to about 40mph or less.

At some 200 metres above the surface, a radar signal will trigger the airbags which will open and protect the tiny machine.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.