MARS MISSION Scientists await sign from lander

The United States has success fully landed three crafts on Mars.
LONDON (AP) -- Scientists waited in vain for a sign that Europe's tiny Mars lander, the Beagle 2, had survived a landing on the Red Planet. Both a U.S. satellite and British radio telescope failed to pick up its signal.
The Beagle 2, designed to search for signs of life on Mars, was believed to have landed shortly before 10 p.m. Wednesday, its impact softened by parachutes and gas bags.
An early effort by an American satellite orbiting Mars, the Mars Odyssey, failed to pick up a signal from the Beagle. Late Thursday, scientists at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, scanned the Martian surface with a huge radio telescope between 5 p.m. EST and 7 p.m. EST, but received no transmission, the British physics and astronomy research agency said.
Officials said they remained optimistic about establishing communication with the lander. The next opportunity will be via Mars Odyssey at 1:15 p.m. EST today.
"We are not in any way giving up yet," Colin Pillinger, Beagle 2 project's lead scientist, said today at a news conference in London.
Mars Express
In addition to Odyssey, there soon will be a chance for the Beagle's companion ship, the Mars Express, to communicate with the lander. It is also in orbit around the planet.
The Mars Express, which carried the Beagle into space and set it loose a week ago, successfully went into orbit Thursday. That was a crucial success for the European Space Agency's project.
Pillinger said the team had 13 more chances to hear from Beagle until Jan. 4, when Mars Express could try to establish contact.
Pillinger said the mother ship could offer the best hope of reaching the Mars lander, since its communications were specifically designed to hear the probe's transmissions.
The Mars Express is designed to beam back data gathered by Beagle on the surface, as well as to map the Martian surface and search for water with a powerful radar that can scan several miles underground.
In the coming days, controllers must change the orbit of Mars Express from a high elliptical one around the equator to a lower polar orbit that will let it scan more of the surface.
Officials said reasons for not hearing back from Beagle could include its antenna pointing at the wrong angle and the extreme Martian cold distorting its radio frequency.
There have been only three successful Mars landings -- all of them American.
Two U.S. Viking spacecraft made it in 1976, while NASA's Mars Pathfinder and its rover vehicle Sojourner reached the surface in 1997.
Several vehicles, most recently NASA's 1999 Mars Polar Lander, have been lost on landing. The Soviet Mars-3 lander made a soft landing in 1970 but failed after sending data for only 20 seconds.