Beagle 2: Evolution (also called Beagle 3) was a proposed Mars lander mission to search for life on Mars, past or present. Beagle 3 was the proposed successor to the unsuccessful British Beagle 2 Mars lander (which failed during its attempted landing in 2003). The craft was put forward by Professor Colin Pillinger, lead scientist on the previous failed venture. EADS Astrium also played a part in funding and early development of the project. Pillinger dreamed of launching up to two landing craft from an orbiter in 2009 as part of the European Space Agency's Aurora Programme. The putative Beagle craft would have been named after the ship HMS Beagle that took Charles Darwin around the world.
After the Beagle 3 project was rejected by ESA in 2004, Pillinger proposed to the American space agency (NASA) to include a scientific module originally meant for the Beagle 3 in the Mars Science Laboratory Mars lander, but the proposal was not accepted.
Read more about Beagle 2: Evolution: Proposed Payload
Famous quotes containing the words beagle and/or evolution:
“Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Before me, she’s a good wench.
Sir Toby Belch. She’s a beagle true bred, and one that adores me. What o’ that?
Sir Andrew Aguecheek. I was adored once, too.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)