The Second Annual Colin Pillinger Memorial Talk - Beagle 2 and bedbugs

Welcome to the University of Bristol my name's Tim Gallager I'm the Dean of the faculty of Science at the University and it's a pleasure for me to welcome you all here this evening to the second annual Colin Pillinger Memorial Talk. Now this evening there'll be two talks so we're getting extra value there. I will be handing over to Nic, Colin's son, to do the introductions but let me just say what a pleasure it is to be here, this is the second of these lectures, the first was also a well-attended great lecture. I heard Colin give a talk here some years ago about meteorites, probably we're trying to work it out maybe eight odd years ago, but I'm of a certain age and I grew up with Michael Buerk during the Apollo missions and watched deep into the night many of those and have been fascinated by this ever since. My area of science is organic chemistry, so it's a little bit different, but I think that doesn't diminish the thrill that one gets around exploration whatever area of science it involves. So, again, welcome. We have an opportunity to ask questions of our two speakers at the end of this evening's talks and I shall look forward to that as well but I'd now like to hand over to Nic Pillinger to carry out the formal introductions. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and webcast viewers as well. So as you've just heard my name is Nic Pillinger and on behalf of the Pillinger family I would like to also extend our welcome to you this evening to this lecture. After last year's interesting look at the Moon and the lunar samples on which dad started his career we thought it was only logical to move on to Mars and in particular Beagle 2, the project for which he is most well-known. Of course we didn't know at the time of planning this meeting that the mission would once again be so topical. Colin always reminded us that Beagle 2 was not a failure, just deferred success. Tonight we'll be hearing more about that success. Firstly from Professor Mark Sims the Beagle 2 mission manager who will tell us about the project and in particular the recent developments, and then secondly from Dr Taff Morgan, who will be talking about the expanding list of spin-off applications from the Beagle project. So I'd like to again thank you all for coming and hopefully we'll see some of you again next year and but now please let me introduce Professor Mark Sims to start the evening. Good evening everybody. Right so I'm going to talk about Beagle 2, both as a mission and some of the latest results we've got on imaging Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars Taff will follow-on with a talk about some of the applications of the Beagle 2 technology. So how did I get into this? Back in 1969 I was a teenager my father brought me to the University of Bristol to see the moon rocks somewhere in that queue I was stood along with several hundred other people, perhaps thousands in the end to queue up to walk past a small exhibit of the lunar rocks. So introduction to me, I'm from the University of Leicester, I'm Director of the Space Research Centre there and Professor of Astrobiology and Space Instrumentation. As I just said I saw the moon rocks back in 1969 and I can't remember whether it was Colin or one of his colleagues was kind enough to show me around the laboratory in 1969 and I thought this is fascinating, looking at rocks from another world in this case our Moon and I always vowed to if I could be involved in space research. This was reinforced in 1976-77 with the landing of the Vikings on Mars. I should say I'm local, I lived in Keynsham til I was 18 and then went to University and I've been back on occasions ever since. Back in 1997 Colin started to float the idea of Beagle 2 as a mission on ESA's Mars Express mission and called a meeting in the Royal Society in May of that year. A group of us went along to listen to what we thought was a completely crazy idea. It was crazy, it was great fun and as we know nowadays it came excruciatingly close to fully succeeding. So I became in August of that year Project Manager for Beagle 2, I took that role through to 1999 when industry took over the project management and I became the Mission Manager for Beagle 2, which meant I was responsible for the flight operations, flying the spacecraft to Mars operated on the surface with the science being directed by scientists organised by Colin at the Open University. And also getting the instruments there to the spacecraft. After we lost Beagle 2 we decided to conduct our own port post-mortem. There was a full ESA inquiry which I'll come back to later in the context of what we've learnt at Beagle 2 since but we did our own inquiry. That was the closure at the time for the team because we had no information on what happened to Beagle 2. So, why Beagle 2? Why then? It was a unique opportunity in 1997: ESA was proposing Mars Express to fly in 2003, the Allan Hills meteorite 84001 had hit the headlines the previous year with putative evidence of life, though nowadays that's disputed, and there was a restarting and accelerating Mars exploration programme, including Pathfinder and all the NASA missions since. Why bother with Mars? I should explain that the picture behind me, if I can focus this, is actually the best view you'll get of Mars from Earth. It's a bit of a cheat because it's taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. You see this red world of thin atmosphere, ice caps, etc, very cold very inhospitable to life as we know it today but four billion years ago, 3 to 4 billion years ago, it was probably warm and wet we have definitive evidence of that, lots of evidence of water on the surface and a good location for life to start so that's why people want to go and explore Mars. At the time Colin's group and other people within the UK were world-leading geochemists - they still are today - and so it was natural that Colin would propose a lander and try and answer the question "Is there, or was there, life on Mars?" using the instrumentation and techniques he had developed. Also within the UK we're very well known for our innovative engineering, our innovative instrument design and so that folded into the mix of Beagle 2. And it was unique opportunity back in 1997, it was the only European mission going to Mars. We must take that opportunity or not do it. Colin saw this as an ideal mission to integrate both the academic interest in going to the planet and the industrial capability within the UK. And of course the high publicity and education value of doing such a mission as Beagle 2. Beagle 2 science was unique - objectives at the time: detection of past life - extinct life - or extant life - present-day life - by looking for organic compounds in the soil, or regolith as it's technically termed, the analysis of subsurface material in the regime, its geochemistry etc, and the first attempt at crude radiometric dating by using the decay of potassium to argon in rocks. All of those have only just started to be achieved by Curiosity, a long time after Beagle 2. So the science programme was looking at the geochemistry, looking at the minerals, how those minerals are put together in terms of what's called a protology, looking at chemical and physical analysis of the atmosphere, looking at how the landscape has changed the so-called geomorphology and measuring dynamic environmental processes on the planet today. And doing some astronomy on the planet as well looking at the Sun, the bright stars in Phobos and Demos, particularly the latter in actual fact because that would enable us if we got a picture of them to locate our landing site with high accuracy. In terms of the engineering you've seen the model of Beagle 2 outside it's roughly 1.8 x 1.6 metres, not that big, mass of 69 kilos of which about 8.7 were for the instrumentation plus some hardware on Mars Express in order to spin it off the platform. Power is very very low for Beagle 2, it typically was about 10 to 20 watts, I like to think of it in terms of a modern light bulb that's the total power that Beagle 2 consumed and it had lithium-ion batteries you're all familiar with those in your smartphones tablets etc and state-of-the-art solar arrays back in 2003 built of gallium arsenide to get the maximum amount of power. Thermal design on Mars is tricky because the average surface temperature on Mars is minus 40 degrees C and at night it goes down to well over minus hundred. so you've got to have a good thermal design. A lot of the missions use radio isotopes to generate heat, Beagle 2 didn't, it had a very clever design using the solar collector and it was designed to operate for a nominal hundred and eighty days on Mars, or 180 sols as they are called, talking to both NASA missions Odyssey and Mars Express. So Beagle 2 as you can see outside is this pocket watch-type design, it had to fold up in order to get all the things we wanted in the volume we were allowed for Beagle 2. It was highly integrated, no redundancy and it deployed some of its instruments on a small robotic arm and we'll come back to that we come to the questions. I'm not going to go too much through the details of Beagle 2, some of that's for the people who are interested in the technical detail, but that's a cross-section of Beagle 2 in terms of its base unit, the gas analysis package you will hear about a bit later, the electronics etc and the transmitter and the arm and the so-called PAW assembly which was a combination of instruments which we'll talk about in a second. So getting a Beagle 2 the surface of Mars - the so-called six to seven minutes of terror - it's the same for every mission. You have to slow the thing down, the first way you do that is use friction in the atmosphere which heats the heat shield to very high temperatures. You then want to stabilise the probe at supersonic speeds as it goes to subsonic speeds, it has a small pilot chute and a rear cover which were then detached and then the main parachute was deployed and Beagle 2, for people who watch the animation, as you saw was cushioned on its impact by a set of airbags which were inflated with actually ammonia gas. On impact on the surface the main chute would have cut loose, Beagle 2 would have bounced across the surface and then deployed itself. So on landing it would have looked something like this: large air bags which were about 1.2 metres across, Beagle 2 remember at this stage is still folded up, would have been pushed away by their internal gas pressure. Beagle 2 would have fallen to the surface and then deployed itself. So a bit of project history, conceived as I said back in 1997, the first official meeting was in May that year. We then wrote a proposal to ESA which I hand carried on a plane to ESTEC in Noordwijk in Holland and delivered it with a few hours to spare to the deadline. In May that year the European Space Agency came back to us and said it's far too heavy you're going to have to redesign it so I was actually on holiday in Scotland and had a plaintiff phone call from Colin saying we've got a problem what are we going to do about it so when I got back off holiday we had a meeting and redesigned Beagle 2 which originally had a small rover on board down to a static lander of 60 kilos and in the end it ended up being 69. 1999 was a busy year in terms of the funding we got industrially based project manager in February in July we got some initial instrument funds and then later in the year Lord Sainsbury gave us our initial government backing, the ESA science programme committee which has to approve all missions approved us in November that year and then in 2000 we were vetted by NASA, John Casani who was Chief Engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at that time came over and did an extensive review on Beagle 2, his conclusion was what we're doing is nuts but it seems to work so keep going. Beagle 2 was built as a spacecraft in summer 2000 to February 2003. In October 2002 which you'll note is very close the launch which is in 2003 we started the flight model subsystem integration and in January 2003 the lid was closed on the lander for the last time on Earth. The pictures by the way up to the right are some very pretty pictures from Mars Science Laboratory. So we got Beagle 2 the launch site by the skin of our teeth I think we'll put fully accepted that and it was launched on a Soyuz Fregat launcher back on the 2nd of June 2003 and 19th December we said goodbye to it. It was spun off the main spacecraft, I'll show you a picture of that in a minute, and landing was due in the early morning of Christmas Day 2003 and then we never heard from it. We were expecting a transmission from a NASA spacecraft we expected a transmission to Jodrell Bank, we heard nothing. March 2004 we essentially closed the book on Beagle 2 and did our own post mortem. In November 2014 we started to see some images of what could be Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars and I'm not going to spoil the latter part of my talk by talking about that now the picture to the top right by the way was one of the latest pictures by Opportunity on the surface of Mars it's starting to explore this Valley on the side of this crater and the column in the distance is actually a dust devil on Mars which is a few hundred metres across. So, back to Beagle 2 hardware this is a picture of the PAW assembly we have two stereo cameras, microscope, corer-grinder, x-ray spectrometer which looked for the elemental composition of the rocks and a Mosbauer spectrometer which looked at the iron content and then bolted along the back of the PAW was a so-called mole which was this self burying subsurface drill to go collect a sample from deep beneath the surface of Mars. This is the gas analysis package, more of this later in the second talk. This is Beagle 2 just before we closed the lid showing the PAW assembly mounted down in the base with all the shiny material is a multi-layer insulation to keep Beagle 2 warm and happy when it was on the surface of Mars. The PAW assembly didn't have any it was actually designed to work at the ambient temperatures on Mars and the electronics worked down to minus one hundred and ten degrees C. The lander just before the lid was closed, solar concentrator over the battery, the gas analysis package is here and this is the PAW with the robot arm folded behind it. So closing up Beagle 2 delicate process and then with its parachutes and it's airbags everything had to be stuffed literally into the heat shield, front shield here, rear heat shield at the back, so you can see how small Beagle 2 was. Taken to the launch site which was Baikonur in Russia and mounted on Mars Express. Mars Express isn't that big as you can see by the scale of people and Beagle 2 is now covered in rather nifty black MLI as that is a higher performance than the shiny stuff. And 2nd June 2003 it was successfully launched and on its way to Mars and we checked it out a number of times on the way to Mars including updating the software, as far as we were concerned Beagle 2 was healthy and ready to land on Mars. At 08.31 on the 19th December 2003 Beagle 2 was spun up and it was spun up in order to give it some stability before it hit the atmosphere, think of a gyroscope, if you try and topple it, it will tend to stay upright so that's why Beagle 2 was spun up and this was a picture from a camera that ESA put on the top of Mars Express showing Beagle 2 disappearing off into the darkness and off towards Mars, ejected at the correct spin rate and at the correct velocity. So where was Beagle 2 aimed at? It was aimed at a place called Isidis Planitia it's a big old impact site on Mars, an asteroid hit four to four and a half billion years ago it was then backfilled with what we think were sedimentary fluvial rocks and also igneous rocks and this is a close-up of the Isidis basin that little area there which actually isn't that small it's over 60 kilometres long is where Beagle 2 was targeted So what are you looking for if you lose a lander on Mars? You're looking for something extremely small, 1.8 x 1.9 metres if it's fully deployed and the list there which I'm not going to go through so I'll leave you to read while I talk shows you all the different characteristics of the various components of Beagle 2 all of which with the exception of the parachute very very small. The air bags would have deflated and unfortunately the airbags we should have made them bright green but they were orange and that's the same colour as Mars so they would have disappeared unfortunately I'd love to see the airbags in some of the images we've got today. So how do you look for a lost lander? Well we look for a lost lander with Mars Express and the cameras going around Mars at the time but they're relatively poor resolution. They are good resolution in that they're metres or tens of metres but you're looking for something which is a couple of metres across at most. In 2006 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got into orbit with its HiRISE imager which it has in orbit about 250 to 300 kilometres above the surface of Mars and it can resolve its smallest pixel size is about 25 to 30 centimetres and we gradually got a series of images across the landing ellipse for Beagle 2 which was recalculated in 2006 shown as the blue ellipse type shape on the left and the stripes are the images so you've got 30-centimetre pixels, you've got red-green-blue colours, you've got stereo capabilities with HiRISE but each of those strips is 6 x 15 kilometres and contains a billion pixels. Beagle 2 at its largest extent is 8 to 10 pixels across so it really is needle-in-a-haystack time. Various of people including myself started looking through the HiRISE images and you start imagining things, you start to see Beagle 2 on the surface everywhere the reason by the way there are some images off to the right is when Beagle 2 landed the atmosphere was pretty thin, we wondered whether it had overflown its landing ellipse, in actual fact we found it where the green cross is very close to the centre only five kilometres away. And so after a while you get fed up of looking at rocks which might have been Beagle 2 and gradually people dropped off looking at the images, a few hardy souls kept going, one of which was Michael Croon who worked for the European Space Agency during the Mars Express mission and actually was part of the operations team which delivered Beagle 2, and he noticed by chance that there was an object in 2 overlapping images. You look at those images on the left hand side you'll see there's very few which overlap and he cycled back and forth between two images and he saw an object which stayed there meaning it wasn't noise in the camera, meaning it was a real object and it was bright and he alerted the HiRISE team in Jet Propulsion Laboratory they alerted us and as they say the rest is history. This is a picture of the Beagle 2 landing ellipse, it's 60 kilometres by 10 kilometres and this is the little area in which we found Beagle 2. This is some work done by the University of Aberystwyth which looked at the heights across that area where Beagle 2 landed you can see the scale it's only a few metres and the slopes are a few degrees basically so it was a great place to land and this is if you like the discovery image which we put out a press release back in January 2015 Beagle 2 came in on this trajectory here and we see an object here which is Beagle 2, object here which is a parachute, object here which is a rear cover. If you can remember the sequence that we saw in the entry descent and landing. Currently we have 8 images including some in colour but we're looking for ideally all the components of Beagle 2. This is some image processing done by Tim Parker at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on the colour image it is slightly different resolution where the camera works you still see the main parachute, you see some peculiar impact here which we think is a rear cover, you see Beagle 2 up here but you also see a bright spot just north of Beagle 2, I'll come back to that in a second. This is a close-up of the impact point, we think it's the back cover and the drogue chute. Why is it black? The soil's been turned to black because Mars has a very oxidized surface, if you like Mars is a rusty planet and then the impact disturbs that surface and exposes soil which has not yet been oxidized, which tends to be darker in colour. So Tim Parker did the very best he could, combined all the images together and we got what we call the Mickey Mouse shape, it's the right size for Beagle 2 about two meters across, it doesn't cast a shadow by the look of it, it's bright it's flat shiny surfaces, more about that in a second. As you can see the scale bar is 10 metres. Jan-Peter Muller, University College London, who's one of the UK's top image processing specialists, has a lot of computer techniques for producing so-called super resolution images. He released this data back in April this year and you see close-ups of the various targets, parachute actually might look like a parachute now, the pilot chute and the rear cover and the lander and what we now know is the front shield this bright object we saw and we'll come back to that in a second So why do we think it's Beagle 2? Is it not just a shiny rock on the surface of Mars? We have a number of discrete elements, they're expected sizes and shapes and the height, they're not very tall objects Beagle 2, if you look at our model out there, it's about 80 millimetres deep some of the sections of it. They're in the right sequence in terms of the relative positions you would expect the parachute to be first you would then expect the lander the heat shield could land by the lander or even longer that's what we see and the pilot chute and the rear cover would be off to one side. There are expected separations they're the right kind of separations we do computer modeling with. They're the expected colour. They're in the expected place and what led to the recent press release there is a glint. The image changes drastically with the Sun angle it's taken at. So before we get on to that what should we see? We see a lander, we have very good evidence of that being a lander, we see a rear cover and a pilot chute, we have evidence of that, we see the parachute, we don't see the airbags for the reason I have said though I keep looking at the images and wondering is that an airbag? Front shield we see, combination separation, so it's definitely Beagle 2. It's even more definitive after recent work. Unfortunately ExoMars Schiaparelli lander crashed on Mars a few weeks ago these are the latest images from HiRISE showing unfortunately the point at which it crashed, the explosion point with unfortunately bits of the lander around but you see the parachute and the parachute does look like the Beagle 2 parachute. As far as I'm concerned it's the last piece of the puzzle, in terms definitively knowing whether it's Beagle 2. So what did the data tell us? Remember you're looking at a blobby shape, pixel size of 25 centimetres even with aligning a hundred eighty rocks on the surface which is what Tim Parker did and matching the images this is as good as you get. And you can put Beagle 2 on it, and as you see it's the right size. So you've got the base section, the lid section and in this case 2 solar panels. In the announcement we made in January 2015 we said it was at least two panels deployed. That glint effect kept nagging at the back of my mind everybody is familiar with it if you look down your road on a sunny day the glint of the Sun off the windows down the road, they drastically change brightness and your noticability depending on what the angle is to the Sun. So as of 2016, the image data is consistent with only partial deployment, base and lid are open and one or more panels, perhaps maximum three were deployed but the kicker in all this if the fourth panel didn't deploy the radio antenna was under that fourth panel and that was not a design error it was the only place we could put that radio antenna given the constraints that we had in terms of mass and volume of the spacecraft. So as I say this glint effect kept digging away at the back of my mind, and because of a chat with a friend over coffee one night I got introduced to a team at De Montfort University, named there and the team that worked with me at Leicester is also named there, and Jim Clemmet who was the Chief Engineer of Beagle 2 up until the beginning of 2004. The idea we had was to build a virtual reality model of Beagle 2 - younger people in the audience will be familiar with that - a simulation of Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars and model its optical appearance and its reflections as the Sun angle changed and could we reproduce what we're seeing with the HiRISE imager and we've done that by using our human brain and eye, which is very good at pattern matching, it's also very good at false pattern-matching as well as we all know but we've done some mathematical techniques as well we've done correlation analysis we've done a difference between the simulated image and the real images and we ratioed the two as well and all of this is to try to avoid the problem of image processing. Image processing does potentially add false things to an image most of the time it doesn't but we're trying to derive the deployed configuration of Beagle 2. The result of all this is shown in this overhead here this is the original HiRISE image, very blobby, so there it is as raw pixels and you don't see much in terms of the detail of Beagle 2. This is the simulated 3D image of Beagle 2 on the surface. This is the close-up and as you can see two of the panels are heavily illuminated at this Sun angle, one isn't. The base is and the lid is and you can actually get a reasonable match between the two and in actual fact you know from that you can work out the configuration of Beagle 2 on the surface in terms of north-south orientation. It will never be an exact match because we have no idea where these pixels start with relation to Beagle 2. We tried a whole series of different pixelations moving the edge of those pixels across this was the best match we've got and that's actually consistent across three different Sun angles and is consistent with either 3 or 4-panel deployment with three panels matching slightly better. It was a six-month analysis there's more we can dig out of the data, we haven't so far. If three panels deployed then that perhaps answers what happened to Beagle 2. If four panels deployed and the simulation shows it didn't open to 160 degrees like the other panels it opened to 130 which was nominal for the mission if it's got enough power, the question is if that fourth panel did open why couldn't we talk to it? Is it a timing error? A software error? Flat battery? We'll probably never know. And this is a simulation of the heat shield, three different Sun angles, and these are the reproduced pixelated images> Barely see it there, quite strong there, hardly see it at all there and these are the real images at the bottom which I think is a good match and it means the heat shield is laid on its side sat on the surface of Mars. So what does it mean? To sum up, well Beagle 2 successfully entered the atmosphere, its entry descent and landing which is the seven minutes of terror worked, lander software started, deployment probably started but maybe didn't finish. The reason, we have a long list, we've done a lot of engineering analysis, Jim Clemmet has and even if the fourth panel deployed there's at least 21 reasons why it may not have worked. My personal favourite - this is a human being talking rather than a scientist - would be the bad luck scenario. A hard landing because of the thin atmosphere perhaps distorted the structure, that's punctured the airbags and Beagle 2 didn't fully deploy. So it's on Mars, it's not lost, it's worked, it's intact on the surface. So, success or failure? Depends on your viewpoint. It depends on your viewpoint in time as well. In 2004 the team which was over 400 people that worked on Beagle 2 were pilloried at the time in terms of "this was a failure, what have you done? You've wasted all this money, you haven't succeeded." As we know now it got not as Rob Manning, Chief Engineer at JPL says, you got 99 percent of the way there, you got the difficult bit done, it's a pity the last little bit didn't actually work. So I count it as a success. UK and ESA landed on Mars in 2003, successfully entered the atmosphere, first controlled landing on another planet, just ahead of Cassini-Huygens, entry descent and landing system was an engineering success. You might count the fact it didn't fully deploy, if that's the case it's a failure. It was an innovative project, it bound together academics, industry and the general public. People still remember Beagle 2 today as evidenced by the fact that you're here tonight, inspired many people, children, adults, general public and the scientists. And from the UK point of view, it trained a whole generation of engineers and scientists in terms of planetary science and engineering which has led indirectly to the ESA Aurora programme, and the ExoMars programme, the trace gas orbiter which is successfully orbiting Mars, the Schiaparelli lander which unfortunately didn't succeed and the ExoMars rover in 2020. The lessons from Beagle 2 are being used in ExoMars and all sorts of other missions, again a success. Didn't communicate after landing, didn't provide science from the surface. It may have operated for some time on the surface of Mars. As a scientist and engineer I would say the probability of it still operating today is extremely low. As a human being I'd like to think it's still there. So credits and acknowledgments: NASA of course, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Tim Parker, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of Arizona which is the principal investigators for HiRISE, Aberystwyth University, Jan-Peter Muller's group at University College London, special mention to Jim Clemmet De Montfort University who enabled the recent analysis to be done, University of Leicester where I work and enabled me to take part in Beagle 2 originally, special thanks to Michael Croon who found Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars, and very special thanks to Judith and Colin who made all this possible. Thank you very much Well I'm with you Mark I think it was a success so I'm sure everyone here did as well and so what I'd like to talk about is the legacy of Beagle 2 Actually more the legacy of Colin really and it's to do with the team that Colin built that worked on Beagle 2 and other space missions and what we've been doing to try and translate our know-how and our technical knowledge to solve some of the problems back here on Earth and there's a list of them there and I'll probably go through them now with you but I'll start with GAP - the gas analysis package. So this took up about one-third of the Beagle 2 lander it was there to look for the signs of life on Mars. So it was going to sniff the atmosphere and look for methane which again is a potential indicator of the presence of current life it was also going to take rock samples and it was going to burn the rock samples and release carbon dioxide and look at the stable isotope composition of the carbon dioxide and that would give us a fingerprint to indicate whether or not there had been life present on Mars in the past. The Gas Analysis Package is a miniaturisation of three of our laboratory systems. So these are very old pictures now, these are from our old building in fact, and these are all mass spectrometer base systems, they're all about the same size as a family car so we shrunk all that down into the size of Beagle and I actually joined Colin to work on the the system on the top left there, a system called Miranda. It was a system that my colleague Andy Morse had developed - at least he developed the mass spectrometer part - for his PhD. So Colin was actually doing space technology transfer in the 1990's. I joined the group in 1993 so even before we had a name for it Colin was doing it, so that's the kind of person he was. These systems, the one on the bottom is is for doing carbon dioxide again as you can see the systems are pretty huge. The team that Colin built to miniaturise it is shown here. There are eight of us as well as Colin, what's amazing is that seven of us are still at the Open University. Jenny is working now in senior management but six of us are actually still working in space instrumentation and in technology transfer and again you'll see a lot of these faces as I go through the talk. Daz, who's the guy on the right hand side, he's now left us but he's a CAD engineer and he now works in in the space industry and has been working in satellite manufacture. At the back left is Simeon Barber and anybody who came to the talk last year would have heard about the the idea of going to the Moon and looking for volatiles on the Moon and Colin kicked off that project with L-VRAP and it is now Simeon who has picked up that mission and we hope in 2021 to part of the European Space Agency and Russian Space Agency mission to the Moon to the poles to actually look for the presence of water and volatiles with the idea being if you got water on the Moon you can start to use that as a resource Daz was a CAD designer. On his computer he had a zoom button. Unfortunately my finger stays the same size so this is us actually trying to put together the Gas Analysis Package in a clean room I'm the one impersonating a teapot on the left-hand side there, the guy doing the work is the engineer who is doing the the wiring, but you can see those are the kind of conditions we built Beagle under and this is actually before it went into the sterile facility - the AAF - so this is actually the clean room before the really really clean room which Judith of course was very prominent in actually getting built and it was the cleanest place in Europe at the time. This is now an animation of how GAP would have worked on Mars. So you might have seen the video at the very beginning, you're seeing the arm bringing the sample, so in a minute you'll see the arm come down and the idea was we would collect rocks from beneath the surface of the Martian surface to then give us samples of rock that were not oxidised. It would then drop down into a funnel and then into a carousel system with a series of ovens. Each of these ovens was about the size of my little fingernail, made from platinum and capable of getting to over a thousand degrees centigrade. As you'll see the carousel turns around then goes to a tapping station and a ball was driven down into the tapping station, deforms the platinum bucket, you get the electrical connections and you can heat your sample up. You can do that in a stepwise manner and that allows you to fingerprint what's present in the actual sample. So you turned the rock into a gas, mainly carbon dioxide, and that then goes into a chemistry set and the actual sample is then processed to clean it up and then it goes into the mass spectrometer for analysis. So these are the kind of analyses that Colin and Ian Wright and the rest of the group do with meteorite samples back in the laboratory. So we shrunk the big lab systems and we do the chemistry on Mars. So once the gas goes into the reactors it gets cleaned up and then it goes into the mass spectrometer. So when it enters the mass spectrometer it's ionised - in a minute you'll see some flashing - and that basically turns the gas from neutral to ions. You can accelerate that using voltages and then it goes through as you can see there through the slits so that allows you to focus the beam and the beam gets fired around the actual magnet which is in the shape of a right angle, it's a six centimeter radius and that allows you to separate the different masses present. So in the case of carbon dioxide we look at mass 44, 45 and 46 and we're looking at the ratio of those compounds, you'll see they'll hit a bucket in a minute and you can actually count those ions. And by counting those ions you get a ratio and by looking at that ratio and comparing it to standards you can then relate that back to things on Earth and whether or not things are biological or or inorganic in origin. And again, that mass spectrometer you'll see a bit later on, we're applying it some samples here on Earth but it works in pretty much identical to the way that the GAP would have worked. Beagle 2 was not the first space mission that Colin worked on. Despite what you might have seen on the TV, these are the people behind the Ptolemy instruments on Rosetta. Colin, Ian Wright with his long hair there, he had short hair in the previous picture, and two colleagues from RAL Space - Ray Turner and Eric Sawyer, and they proposed Ptolemy as an instrument to go to the comet on board the Rosetta mission, I think it was in 1994-95 it was funded and in 2001 we developed the Ptolemy instrument, or by 2001 rather, and this is the Ptolemy instrument so we shrunk something the size of a car down to something literally the size of a shoebox. It was a gas chromatograph isotope ratio mass spectrometer but basically it was designed to do similar measurements to Beagle but different so it was going to measure different chemical species and those would have answered questions like did water on Earth come from a comet and are the building blocks of life, the organic compounds we are all made from, our they present on the comet. On the right hand side you can see Ptolemy onboard the actual Philae lander, so we were the very very first thing that went on the lander. We delivered that in September 2001, we launched in 2004, we chased the comet for 10 years and four billion miles until of course we landed in 2014 Unfortunately Colin didn't get to see this picture, this is an image taken a month before we landed. So this is probably the world's most expensive selfie - 1.4 billion - but it is beautiful it is an absolutely fantastic image taken by a camera on the lander looking out over the orbiter looking at the solar panels and also the comet in the background. Again you can see the jets coming out the neck and this picture also has one of the oldest and one of the youngest things in our solar system in the same picture, it's a beautiful image. Before we got to the comet , until about August 2014, we were all working on the assumption that the comet would be the shape of a potato, so it's kind of elongated. Once we had the images back we then realised we had more like the shape of a rubber duck so we then spent several hundred pounds getting a 3D printed version of the comet made so we could decide where we were going to land. Having spent all that money on this 3D printed version we decided not to mark it and so Andy Morse popped down to Morrison's, and bought a 69p duck. Simon's son Matthew then marked up the landing site and in fact the landing site is J - Agilkia - that's where we actually did end up landing. It's not where we ended up staying but it's where we first landed andso we actually took this to the Science Museum for a kids event and the Science Museum got really excited and this duck is now saved for for history or whatever you want to call it so just by marking it with a felt pen we've added quite a bit of value to this Morrison's duck. So if anybody wants to have any more signed I'm sure we can get Matthew to mark them up for you. Now we actually did land of course and as you saw we had a very exciting ride. There isn't time to show you the video but you know that week of landing was probably most exciting tiring frustrating but ultimately satisfying week and we actually managed to take data almost immediately after the first bounce so whilst everybody was celebrating at Darmstadt where all the politicians were, those of us in the lander centre knew there was a problem immediately. People knew the harpoons hadn't fired, people knew it was spinning, we couldn't be on the surface. But we didn't care because we already had data. We got data by sniffing the gas that was thrown up and if you want to know what a comet smells like under your chair there should be a postcard Some of you have probably smelt it already This was something we did for The One Show, my colleague Colin Snodgrass did, and comets do not smell good. In fact Alex Jones on The One Show described it as smelling like her granny's toilet cleaner I warn you that the smell does linger so I would put it down otherwise when you walk into home tonight you'll be smelling of toilet cleaner. So the problem with space missions is they're a bit like London buses, we had three together with Beagle, Rosetta, Cassini-Huygens. We're still waiting for the next one. So we had to look at how we could use the technology we developed so here you can see the kind of heritage of the the kind of stuff I'm about to speak about. So it started with the kind of systems that Ian and Colin and Monica and other people developed at the Open University for analysing meteorites. We then went through obviously Rosetta, Beagle 2 of course and then we had various other funding sources that allowed us to look at a whole range of different applications for mass spectrometry back here on Earth. And the reason we could do that is because we developed this world leading infrastructure - the labs we have at the OU are fantastic, we're very well-equipped and again most of that of course was down to Colin's funding activities and as important as that, as well as having the technology is having the multidisciplinary skillsets so that GAP team you saw there, we had geologists, we had engineers, we had CAD people, we had chemists, physicists and when you put that disparate skillset together which is what space missions do then you have a very very powerful resource which you can work in partnership with end-users to develop a whole range of new capabilities. So this is just a summary of some of the people we have worked with and there is over 3 million pounds worth of activities there and in fact the the most recent one Leonardo and ESA is the space mission that's going to go to the Moon and that itself is a £3 million pound project. The most applicable technology that we've developed directly for a space mission is this valve. This is a valve that was used to control the gas on Ptolemy to allow us to control the flow of gas into the mass spectrometer. We then redesigned it and we've managed to patent the actual design because we made so many changes from what we originally had and just last year we have actually signed a manufacturing license agreement with Surrey Satellites so Surrey are owned by Airbus Defense and they're the people who put up geostationary satellites so who knows in a few years time the reason you can watch your Sky TV may be because it's been controlled by one of these valves. It's also been evaluated by NASA and NASA are looking at it for Resolve which is the next Mars mission or one of the future Mars missions, and again this valve technology could actually go into space again. And again we will be using it for the Moon mission. The biggest impact project we've had is actually developing a system just down the road in Abbey Wood, the defense equipment support MOD. They had funding to look at developing the new Successor submarine which is the Trident replacement submarine, which are the submarines that basically keep us safe. And we were approached in 2010 to look at whether or not we could develop a new system for them based on Ptolemy and we did develop a system, it took us less than nine months although we delivered the box to Glasgow, or Faslane, which is in Scotland. The submarine was there, the box was there, unfortunately the paperwork wasn't. So we had to wait six months before we could actually put it on trial but this system has been on sea trial and basically it has changed the way that BAE systems designed submarines for the future. So currently there's an air monitoring system on board which is an American system, there's only one of them. A submarine can't go to sea without that working, and our system is much smaller, it's faster, it's better, it's cheaper and we'll save the the government and the MOD a lot of money but more importantly it allows them to have three systems on board so it makes the environment much safer for our submariners and again there's the project team and again you'll recognise at least four of those people from a previous picture. So we've broken a 30-year American monopoly, currently all UK submarines use US capabilities, but that technology is really old now. As I say it's faster, it's better it's cheaper and it will be a British company that take this forward. I think that they've just announced they're going to call it Dreadnought. It's going to be the first submarines designed to have women on board and have facilities for women, it's the first time they've had an educational facility on board a submarise. So the OU already provides online courses for submariners but now they will actually have the ability to do training. So it's very nice to be part of this and hopefully as I say this technology will last for the next fifty or sixty years. We do develop systems as well for commercial applications. I like to show this one because it's the first time I've ever been called a boffin. So we developed a robotic system that's been used by the world's largest fragrance provider a company called Givaudan, who are based down in Ashford in Kent, and they produce all the kind of smelly stuff that goes in to products like toothpaste and washing powders, shampoos and all the expensive stuff that you buy. So I hate to burst your bubble but when you buy really expensive perfume it was probably made in the factory that used to be run by ICI down in Kent. But we managed to provide a system that allows them for the first time to do quantitative measurements about their perfumes and so they're very happy and again it would be a nice REF story for us. In terms of health then probably the longest project we've been working on is this one and the answer to the question can dogs smell cancer is yes they can and so can we. So we've copied what dogs do and we've used a commercial system - quarter of a million pounds' worth of equipment and we've worked in partnership with clinical partners at Amersham Hospital but also at Cranfield University the bioinformatics group to look for patterns of compounds that could be indicative of cancer. In fact this work came about because Judith came to me with a BBC news website article where original work by the dogs was published just after this and that was back in September 2004 so we've actually developed not only a test for bladder cancer but also prostate cancer and that's really important because currently there is no non-invasive diagnostic test for prostate cancer we rely on something called the PSA test which is a blood test PSA test, there's over one hundred and twenty thousand positive PSA tests in the UK per year, 80,000 of those are wrong so men have been told they might have cancer and then going through procedures which are very invasive to then be told that they actually didn't have it after all so we developed a sniffing test, so again we can sniff comets, Mars, submarines and now urine, and we're using a patent profile to actually allow us to identify whether or not the patient has old man's prostate, or benign prostate hyperplasia, or cancer Our accuracy is around about 83%. We've done a sample of round about a hundred patients so the next stage really is to take it forward and actually to blind trials and everything else and we're looking for partners to do that with. A few years ago I crossed from academia into the dark side of commercial work and I blame the two older gentleman on the left-hand side there, Ejaz and Phil there were two guys from RAL Space, two professors, and in fact Ejaz had developed the ionisation source on Ptolemy which I never knew until I met him, and they approached me about taking the technology and using effectively... Well they had an idea for a STFC patent to look at the gases that cause helicobacter pylori. So both these companies have been sponsored by the European Space Agency, the business incubation Centre at Harwell, so funding from ESA to technology transfer and also from Innovate UK through the Harwell Space Launchpad. The second company, I took a phone call at RAL Space from my business partner Jason, who's the guy on the right, he's a pest controller from Manchester, he said I think I can smell bedbugs, can you build me a machine that'll do it because my knees are going and I'm getting old, I need to build a machine. So we formed the company and we're currently in negotiations with the world's largest pest control company on how we take this technology forward. So in terms of helicobacter pylori why is it important well actually I realised when I was preparing the slides that when I joined the OU Colin had a PhD student who'd just finished working on this so that was back in 1993. It's only taken me 23 years to catch up. The idea is helicobacter pylori is a bacteria that about one-third of the world's population and up to forty percent of the UK population have had it, H pylori. And in the developing world there'll be up to eighty percent of the world's population infected usually because of poor sanitation and transfer of faeces or bacteria. And most people get it when they're kids and the problem with it is is the bacteria gets beneath the mucus layer in your stomach and it causes ulcers. So it's not stress that causes ulcers, it's now been proven that its bacteria and up to ninety-five percent of duodenal ulcers and up to seventy-five percent of gastric ulcers are caused by this bacteria. It's quite easy to treat with antibiotics and protein pump inhibitors but the actual difficulties getting the people to the to the treatment or actually to the diagnosis. Up to 3 percent of those infected with helicobacter pylori can go on and get cancer. So it's an important thing to treat and just to give you an idea of the numbers, if you just look at India and China alone, and in fact I was at a presentation a couple of weeks ago where they said that the Chinese government might actually start testing all of their population because the cost of not treating it early on are so huge. So you could be looking at over 22 million tests. What are going to do, well we're going to look at carbon isotopes, exactly what we did on Mars, but this time instead of it coming from rock samples it comes from breath. If you give somebody an isotopically-labeled urea tablet the bacteria break down and metabolise the carbon dioxide, and it comes out in the breath and you can measure that shift. Now the difficulty is in most systems are, like the lab systems you've seen before, they're very expensive and they're not portable or deployable. So what we've done is take the concept of the Gas Analysis Package on Beagle 2 and we built our own 6 centimeter radius mass spec but one that's affordable and that can be then taken out to places like India and China and used to diagnose people and get them treated Bedbugs are a massive problem, huge in places like New York although apparently New York's only the 18th most popular spot for bedbugs, I think Boston's the biggest one London has a huge problem, hotels in particular. The one piece of advice I can give you, if you ever put your suitcase in a hotel never put it on your bed, put it on the stand with the metal straps, that's where you put your suitcase because they can't climb up the metal that's why they're there. So we basically are looking for the chemicals, so bedbugs communicate through the signature, you can also find bedbugs if you see little spotting of blood around the place and so we look for that as well. So put into context there are nearly 600,000 hotel rooms in the UK, a quarter of them are actually in London, and nearly 5 million in the US. But what I didn't realise is that most hotels are just a brand, a bit like McDonald's or KFC, they're franchised so actually you have facility management companies actually do most of that work one of which we talked to said well we let the customers find them for us so I won't tell you which brand that was but most of the really big hotels obviously are taking this very seriously especially now there is some indication that bed bugs might be zoonotic vectors so in other words bed bugs might transmit disease up until now has never been thought he did there's been a study in penn medicine which suggests that it can transmit something called Chagas disease which is a very nasty parasite which can affect your heart so increasingly people are becoming more and more proactive about this So what I've hopefully shown you today is that you know space missions mean you've got to make things small, light, low power, got to be rugged, shock vibration proof, and be able to survive environmental extremes like on a comet or Mars. If you're going to build those kind of systems you've got to build multidisciplinerary teams, you've go to build partnerships and once you do that you can then start building new solutions and new technologies and eventually develop systems that give you new opportunities. So Colin is the person who started me and most of us on that journey, our journey around the solar system will continue. As I say the Moon in 2021 but also we're looking for challenges back here on Earth so if you've got any ideas about what I can sniff next then feel free to tell me and I'll just leave you with one message which I think it sums up Colin basically which was, he had a dream, he put together the team, he had the belief in us and as Mark has just shown we probably succeeded. That's it, thank you. Thank both very much. That was fantastic and I think what we've seen is the challenge around science and technology and to think of the mission itself as the end of the story, I think Taff has shown us that it's very much just the beginning of the story and where the spin-offs from what we do from the challenges we face and the way that we go about solving those challenges, the spin-offs from this I think that's where the imagination really does extend. So we have a few minutes for some questions, we have a roving microphone because if you don't use the microphone we won't capture it on the streaming and I'll also ask Mark and Taff to come up here again to use the microphone to answer any questions. So would anybody care to raise a question and Thom has the microphone down here. Let's do it nice and close. I saw that there was the logo of Rothamsted Research on one of the partnerships and I was just wondering what the the project on that one is? Well that particular project was to look at something called the bluetongue virus which is a zoonotic vector that affects sheep and starting to affect sheep in the UK because global warming is meaning that the UK is getting warmer, insects that didn't bite in the UK are now moving further and further north so Rothamsted and Pirbright Institute and also London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine so James Logan who was in the video was also part of the project and the idea was could we smell the sheep to then try and work out that they've been infected so were they producing different volatile compounds. Any other questions? A question for Professor Sims In regard to the Schiaparelli probe I happened to see a picture of it it seemed quite similar to the Beagle in terms of that watch case design, is that something that Beagle 2 has brought to space science, in that approach to lander design? In some aspects yes, in most landers you want a compact shape they tend to be round in some cases, Schiaparelli was a bit bigger had more mass, different landing technique, it used retro rockets and then would have crashed down on the surface, so yes to some extent Beagle 2 has influenced things but those influences were there I think before Beagle 2 started. Schiaparelli wouldn't have unfolded, it would rely on his batteries, it would have worked for a few days, I feel very sad for the team they put a lot of effort in, like the Beagle 2 team so tragedy for them and a tragedy that they didn't get any data. I guess this is one for Professor Sims In passing you mentioned the need to provide biosecurity on probes going to Mars, could you enlarge on that a bit because I know it makes the whole thing much more difficult. It certainly does, your not wantonly allowed to contaminate another planet it goes under the name of planetary protection, it's an old UN treaty which has been there since the late 1950's in actual fact and you need to sterilise your spacecraft for two reasons: one, not to contaminate your target but also not to get false positives from life you may have taken to Mars in the first place. In the Viking days, back in the 1960-70s, when vulves were used in good technology like that which unfortunately i'm old enough to remember you could put your whole spacecraft in another and cook it for 5 days and sterilise any life-forms on it, nowadays with modern technology you can't do that so you tend to sterilise the components and then put the spacecraft together in an aseptic or sterile facility. And for Beagle 2 a special facility was built at the Open University for putting Beagle 2 together and you have to actually do microbial monitoring of your staff as well. Unfortunately some of us actually have larger microbial loads than others and some people have to shave their beards off to stop generating microbes which potentially would contaminate Beagle 2. So lots of complications there in terms of sterilising spacecraft, getting it to launch pad, keeping its sterile and operating it on Mars. I remember seeing Daz's fingerprints and Judith collecting a plate and it was disgusting. If you take a typical coin out of your pocket there'll be tens of bacteria spores on it before sterilisation and you have to clean your spacecraft to an alarming degree, essentially you have to do a million-fold reduction in the number of bacteria typically or more. Hi my name is Des, I used to be a physics teacher and I'm old enough to remember the Viking landings, I was very young at the time, and I'm curious really about all these different Mars landings that have happened over the decades and from the outsider's perspective all seems a bit random but is there a progression or are they all competing with one another, how does it all work? They all seem to be doing similar things and yet different things, educate us I think you've hit it on the head, they are doing similar things but different things, certainly NASA has a programme of Mars landers now, it lost interest in Mars after Viking and didn't go back until 1997 in Pathfinder and that's progressed through everything to Curiosity we see today. Beagle 2 was at the time was a once-off opportunity for Europe to get to Mars to do its own science use its own instruments and that's now morphed into the Aurora programme and the rover that will go hopefully in 2020 assuming it's funded, there's a meeting going on next week which will decide its funding, It's a bit of competition and lots of collaboration as well, science is international, people don't necessarily do the same thing they would do slightly different things, they will go to different landing sites there's lots of places on Mars we'd like to go to unfortunately some of the more interesting ones of the very difficult ones to get to. The surface area of Mars is the about equivalent land area of the Earth, so pick a site on Earth where do you go? Lots of places on Mars to go, lots of places to explore and all that constant question was their life there or even did life start there and was transferred to Earth and so we might be the remnants, as some wag said, Martian pond ***. So this would be a question for Professor Sims, was there a specific ESA bid for a lander to go on Mars Express or did your team just spontaneously come up with a crazy idea and ran to ESA and say please put this on Mars because you've made it sound quite improbable so I'm guessing there was a proposal there already There wasn't a proposal in the beginning of 1997 there was Colin's idea to put a lander on it I think it's fair to say ESA thought a lander was a complication too much. Despite some attempted discouragement we put together a bid which went to ESA in 1998 and Beagle 2 got selected, everybody realised that putting a lander on Mars was important, it would do unique science, it would complement the observations from Mars Express from orbit and as they say the rest is history. We got it there, we launched it but certainly back in 1996 ESA started dreaming of Mars Express, they didn't consider a lander, they thought it was a complication too much. I have a question for Professor Sims, so since there are so many Mars landers already working on Mars, is it possible that other rovers can rescue Beagle 2 and bring it back to life? I wish, unfortunately they're thousands of kilometres away so even at top speed they would take a while to get there, it is probably a great understatement. It would be nice to think you could drive over and push the panel open and Beagle 2 would work, unfortunately that won't happen, I suspect maybe one day, in 20-30 years time, perhaps even longer in the future maybe somebody will walk up to the side of Beagle 2, and examine Beagle 2 but unfortunately not. It would be great to rescue it but practicalities of Mars missions means that's impossible. Thank you, probably just to have a nice conversation with NASA. We'll take one more, down here Hello this is a question for Professor Sims, were there any specific advancements in the electronics for Beagle 2? Yes, you're taxing my memory now. Certainly it was a very low powered microprocessor, it was a state-of-the-art microprocessor the type has eluded me at the moment but may come back. It was a very low power system, it was designed to operate on 10 to 20 watts typically with peak power on some of the instruments going up to 30 watts. At the time it was state-of-the-art solar arrays, gallium arsenide arrays, three-layer arrays I think to get the maximum power. You find a lot of this in the Beagle 2 books that Colin published. Software was quite novel and it was two different software systems, one for entry and descent and then a multitasking system for the surface operations. What we do know from the images of Beagle 2 is that that switchover happened because the deployment started. We actually reloaded all the software on the way to Mars, something that is not recommended but we did because we were pushing the time limit for preparing Beagle 2, as we operated Beagle 2 we found all sorts of software patches they got to a ridiculous stage where we decided we'd bite the bullet and reload all the software on the way to Mars something which is not recommended but it did work and we did succeed, we know from the commands and telemetry that software was uploaded and we now know from the images it did work because the deployment did start. Thank you Good, thank you everybody It falls to me just to bring things to a close this evening and I wanted to firstly acknowledge Mark and Taff for the the talks that they have given us this evening and I'm sure you'll join me in doing that. Taff, dogs can smell cancer they can also smell truffles so if you ever developed something that will detect truffles I'll happily help you test that. I'd also like to thank Judith and Colin's family for creating this opportunity for us all, for supporting this, and we will be looking forward to the third Colin Pillinger memorial lecture next year so I'd also like to acknowledge all of the support that we've had from the family in allowing us to do this And finally I think looking back on this as I said this was an area that has always interested me and clearly interested a lot of other people and we heard from Mark how the challenges that the Beagle mission faced and we talked about success and failure and I think I do wonder if success and failure are the right words here at all, I think really success is the right word here and I think going forward in terms of looking at what other people have done one of the things I am reminded of here is I think a quote from Isaac Newton which is that if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants if we don't take challenges and meet challenges head-on we never progress and progress inevitably comes with challenges and the overcoming of those challenges I think we've seen that whole story exemplified here this evening so again I think this goes back to one of the Giants and I think that's who we should acknowledge finally this evening, Colin Pillinger. Good so thank you everybody for coming have a safe journey home, until next year.