"Mars Express is the first fully European mission to any planet.
It is an exciting challenge for European technology."

Rudi Schmidt, Mars Express Project Manager, ESTEC.

From the Greeks more than two thousand years ago to Eugene Antoniadi in the mid 1900s, Europeans have made many important observations of Mars with the naked eye and through Earth-bound telescopes. They have even contributed their fair share of speculation and fantasy about the planet in a fine tradition beginning in 1897 with the publication of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells in which hostile Martians invade Earth.
 
Europe, however, has never sent its own spacecraft to Mars – that is until now. The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and its lander, Beagle 2, were launched on 2 June 2003. Mars Express will play a key role in an international exploration programme spanning the next two decades.

Research institutes throughout Europe provided the instruments on board the orbiter. Some were first developed for the ill-fated Russian spacecraft, Mars '96. Now upgraded, they will provide remote sensing of the atmosphere, ground and up to 5 kilometres below the surface, to a degree of accuracy never before achieved.  
 

Astronomer Date Country Discovery Nicolaus Copernicus 1473-1543 Poland Described the motion of the planets, including Mars, around the Sun Tycho Brahe 1546-1601 Denmark First to map accurately the movement of Mars across the sky Johannes Kepler 1561-1630 Germany Worked out the orbit of Mars Galileo Galilei 1564-1642 Italy First to observe Mars through a telescope Christiaan Huygens 1629-1695 The Netherlands First to observe a feature on Mars, the Syrtis Major Giovanni Cassini 1625-1712 France First to observe the poles of Mars William Herschel 1738-1822 United Kingdom First to measure the diameter of Mars Giovanni Schiaparelli 1835-1910 Italy Described 'canali' (channels) misinterpreted as canals on Mars Eugene Antoniadi 1870-1944 France Produced the most accurate map of Mars before the space age

 
The information gleaned will help answer many outstanding questions about Mars. One concerns the fate of water that once flowed freely on the planet’s surface early in its history; another is whether life ever evolved on the Red Planet.

Beagle 2 would have been the first lander since NASA's two Viking probes in the 1970s to look specifically for evidence of past or present life. Unfortunately, Beagle 2 was declared lost after it failed to make contact with orbiting spacecraft and ground-based radio telescopes. No other Mars probe planned so far was to have made exobiology so central to its mission.
 
 
Last update: 2 November 2004