The image was taken by the Mars Observer Camera (MOC), onboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, on January 5th, and is the first maximum resolution image to be obtained for the Beagle 2 landing site. Mike Malin, Principal Investigator for the MOC instrument, was able to release the image this weekend following processing by Malin Space Science Systems.

The narrow angle image is made available below as Figure 1. Also provided are two images of the entire ellipse and surrounding area. Figure 2 was obtained by the wide angle lens of the MOC instrument concurrently with the high resolution strip, and Figure 3 is a mosaic assembled from medium resolution images obtained by the camera THEMIS on NASA's other Mars orbiter, Odyssey.

The images, and the caption below, are the property and copyright of Malin Space Science Systems. Any reproduction should follow the guidelines laid out in the MSSS website.

This high resolution image strip (Fig. 1) acquired on January 5, 2004 at 10:01:03 UTC by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft in orbit around Mars crosses the western portion of the final Beagle 2 landing ellipse. It was taken in the narrow angle mode of the MOC camera, spans a width of approximately 3 km and had a resolution of about 1.5 m per pixel. Fig. 2 shows a MOC wide angle image taken at the same time as the narrow angle view, with an overlaid outline of the landing ellipse and the narrow angle footprint. In Fig. 3, a mosaic covering all of the Beagle 2 ellipse from Mars Odyssey THEMIS observations at 15 m per pixel and 100 m per pixel, respectively, is given along with an outline of the location of the MOC narrow angle strip footprint.

What is remarkable about this MOC narrow angle image is that it is the first observation of the Beagle 2 landing area acquired after the lander's arrival at Mars on December 25, 2003. In fact, the image was requested by the Beagle 2 team to be taken in the context of a systematic search for elements of the lander such as the parachute, aeroshell and the lander itself. Dr. Mike Malin, the PI of the MOC camera, in a spirit of open cooperation quickly agreed to target this observation at the first opportunity of MGS crossing the landing ellipse in daylight, and the sequence was executed as planned and the image downlinked on January 7.

There are no obvious indications for lander elements within the high resolution MOC image. Of course, there is only a small chance that Beagle 2 actually landed in this part of the ellipse. The highly successful and astonishingly clear identification of the MER-A lander within Gusev crater as a result of another targeted observation of MOC however bodes well for eventual identification of Beagle 2 elements once more images covering the landing ellipse are acquired. This is planned to occur in a series of targeted MGS/MOC imaging activities during the course of February. As opposed to earlier imaging to identify the Viking Lander 1 and Mars Pathfinder vehicles, MER-A as well as its parachute and backshell stood out so clearly that this can only be attributed to lack of even a thin dust coating on the hardware surfaces which should just as well be the case for Beagle 2. Viking Lander-1, Mars Pathfinder and MER-A imaging was aided by prior knowledge of the 'exact' locations of these spacecraft relative to surface features as well as in the inertial frame which is not the case for Beagle 2, requiring in a worst case having to cover all of the landing ellipse with high resolution images.

Even though MOC imaging of the Beagle 2 ellipse can as yet not be performed with the image motion compensated technique (IMC) with 0.5 m along-track resolution applied for observation of the other landers - due to lack of knowledge of exact surface location and associated larger required image data volume for larger surface coverage - 'normal' MOC narrow angle imaging with 1.5 m surface resolution should suffice to show highly reflective items such as the Beagle 2 parachute or the lander itself. To gain an understanding of what may have gone wrong with Beagle 2 during its descent on Christmas Day, it will be vital to verify from MOC observations whether the parachute has deployed and thus possibly lies on the surface in a similar fashion as the MER-A chute, and whether the three airbags and the lander are visible. Depending on what we may eventually see from these observations, it may be possible to dramatically narrow the search for causes of Beagle's mishap.