The British lander that vanished on Christmas — and almost made it.
This is the site on Isidis Planitia where the British-led Beagle 2 lander was released from ESA's Mars Express and touched down on Christmas Day 2003 — then fell silent. For over a decade it was presumed destroyed, until NASA spotted it intact in 2015.
Claim your plot here →Beagle 2 was designed to sniff the Martian soil and air for signs of life, folding open like a pocket watch to expose its solar panels and instruments. When it went quiet after landing, engineers assumed it had crashed, and the loss became one of the most famous near-misses in space exploration.
In 2015 NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the lander intact on the surface. It had landed successfully but only two of its four solar panels deployed, blocking the radio antenna and leaving it unable to communicate. Beagle 2 had, in effect, made it to Mars — it simply could never call home.