You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

This is a download from the BBC.

To find out more, visit BBC.co.

UK slash Radio 4.

On this day, eight years ago, where most of us were recovering from Christmas,

my guest Colin Pilinger was waiting for a phone

call from Mars.

It's been another very frustrating day for the British scientists involved in the Beagle

2 mission to Mars.

Their fifth attempt to make contact with the spacecraft has once again ended in failure.

The Beagle hadn't landed, or if it had no one knew where it had landed.

So this robot was due to land on the Red Planet on Christmas Day 2003.

It was a mission to look for life on Mars.

Well, in a very down-to-earth way I'd like to say Colin Pillinger

...