The Beagle 2 mission to Mars
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2019
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Christmas Day 2003, a British spacecraft was due to land on Mars and begin searching for signs of life. The late Professor Colin Pillinger was the man behind the mission, his daughter Shusanah spoke to Rob Walker about Beagle 2 in 2015. This programme is a rebroadcast.
Photo:Lead scientist Colin Pillinger poses with a model of Beagle 2 in November 2003. (Credit: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello, you're listening to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:40.2 | I'm Claire Bowes. |
| 0:41.7 | All this week we've been looking at the history of space exploration and today |
| 0:46.4 | we're remembering the Beagle II mission, launched to search for life on Mars. It was the brainchild of British scientist Professor Colin |
| 0:56.2 | Pilinger and it was due to land on the red planet at Christmas 2003. Rob Walker reports. |
| 1:05.0 | It inspired the whole nation such that there were people sitting on the edge of their seats on Christmas morning. |
| 1:11.0 | Just amazing, like every single person I know made some kind of contact saying, we were watching, we were |
| 1:16.7 | waiting, nobody cared about what was on TV for Christmas Day, they were all watching Beagle |
| 1:20.8 | tea. |
| 1:21.8 | It's early on Christmas morning 2003 and journalists and |
| 1:25.6 | scientists are packed into a room in central London. They're waiting for news from |
| 1:30.2 | Beagle 2. The first lander since the 1970s to look specifically for evidence of life on |
| 1:36.3 | Mars. And all eyes are on Professor Colin Pilinger of the Open University, the driving force |
| 1:42.4 | behind the mission. |
| 1:43.4 | Six o'clock this morning and the first chance to hear from Beagle too. |
... |
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