{"id":793030,"date":"2026-10-05T21:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T21:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/793030\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T21:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T21:16:08","slug":"plaque-to-honour-bristol-scientist-who-led-beagle-2-mars-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/793030\/","title":{"rendered":"Plaque to honour Bristol scientist who led Beagle 2 Mars mission"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In the years that followed the Beagle 2 mission, the UK contributed significantly to flagship space projects, including the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/science-environment-25814454\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Rosetta comet chaser<\/a> and the James Webb Space Telescope.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Beagle 2 started the UK down the line of being able to do planetary missions and knowing it could engineer them,&#8221; said Professor Mark Sims, who managed the Beagle 2 mission.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A more recent example is the ExoMars Rover, Rosalind Franklin, which is due for launch in 2028 with the aim of finding out if life has ever existed on Mars.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It&#8217;s a European Space Agency mission but the rover was built in Stevenage and it will land on Mars hopefully in 2030 and look for signs of life which is what Beagle 2 was aiming to do,&#8221; Sims said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the years that followed the Beagle 2 mission, the UK contributed significantly to flagship space projects, including&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":793031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-793030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}