{"id":795776,"date":"2026-10-08T09:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T09:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/795776\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T09:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T09:22:09","slug":"beagle-2-how-a-british-scientist-used-britpops-blur-to-reach-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/795776\/","title":{"rendered":"Beagle 2: How a British scientist used Britpop&#8217;s Blur to reach Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Pillinger was born in Kingswood near Bristol and completed his degree at Swansea University. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He gained international recognition for his lunar research before moving to Cambridge University, where he analysed meteorites found in Antarctica that were believed to have come from Mars.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">By the 1980s, he had become one of the founders of the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at The Open University in Milton Keynes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It was here he conceived the idea of sending a lander, named Beagle 2 by his wife, to Mars, where it could study the red planet directly for signs of life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pillinger was born in Kingswood near Bristol and completed his degree at Swansea University. He gained international recognition&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":795777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-795776","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\/795776","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=795776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/795777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}