ESA, this is Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Beagle has landed.

NASA's main eye in the sky orbiting Mars has spotted Beagle 2, a lander that was part of the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission but failed to phone home after it was released for landing on Mars on Dec. 25, 2003.

ESA announced the discovery Friday, following painstaking analysis of photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter by researchers at the agency's Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, as well as by teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Although the arrival message is 11 years late, it comes as something of a relief for ESA.

The loss prompted an investigation that identified several possible scenarios for what went wrong. Virtually all of the scenarios involved some type of malfunction with the lander's entry, descent, and landing system.

The images suggest that for the most part, the parachute-and-airbag system worked as planned, depositing the lander at its intended landing site within an impact basin known as Isidis Planitia, near the Martian equator. The ensuing silence stemmed from a hardware problem on the lander.

Images from the US orbiter's HiRISE camera show that Beagle landed where it was supposed to land and that no more than three of its solar panels deployed. The panel or panels that failed to fully deploy blocked Beagle 2's communications antenna, rendering the craft mute.

Given the uncertainty over what happened, ESA officials are elated to finally reach some sort of closure on the lander.

Not knowing what happened to Beagle-2 remained a nagging worry," said Rudolf Schmidt, ESAs Mars Express project manager at the time, in a statement. "Understanding now that Beagle-2 made it all the way down to the surface is excellent news.

The news also was welcome in Britain, where the lander was built.

See the rest here:

NASA's Mars orbiter spots lost Beagle rover, 11 years later