LOST AND FOUND

Missing Robot Found on Mars

11 years after it disappeared.

The U.K.’s lost Mars probe Beagle2 has been spotted on the Red Planet’s surface, intact, 11 years after it went missing. Images taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show the robot’s landing location. It tried to make a soft landing on the Mars surface on Christmas Day 2003 but no radio contact was ever made with the probe. Scientists assumed it had been destroyed, but it turns out that its solar-panel “petals” were never unfurled fully. “Without full deployment, there is no way we could have communicated with it as the radio frequency antenna was under the solar panels,” Mark Sims, Beagle’s mission manager, told BBC News.