Soft landings: Valves to help probes reach Mars

On the cold, barren landscape of Mars, violent winds create dust storms that engulf the planet for months at a time. It never rains, temperatures drop to -90°C at night and the atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s.

But it wasn’t always this hostile. Billions of years ago, the Red Planet may have been a warm paradise of blue skies and lakes. Astronomers claim Mars could unlock the secrets of how our solar system formed, and the race to find signs of life on the Red Planet is now heating up.

Manned missions are planned for the 2030s, but before then both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) plan to send probes to the planet’s surface. NASA recently revealed details of its next Mars rover, which will launch in 2020, while ESA is hoping to send the ExoMars rover in 2018.

Both agencies not only have to contend with making the 34-million-mile journey through space, but once there, they will have to somehow land the probes on the planet’s surface. It’s a manoeuvre in which years of planning could go wrong in a matter of seconds — a lesson that Beagle 2 engineers know only too well.