{"id":62138,"date":"2026-10-05T21:19:49","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T21:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/plaque-to-honour-bristol-scientist-who-led-beagle-2-mars-mission\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T21:19:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T21:19:49","slug":"plaque-to-honour-bristol-scientist-who-led-beagle-2-mars-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/plaque-to-honour-bristol-scientist-who-led-beagle-2-mars-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Plaque to honour Bristol scientist who led Beagle 2 Mars mission"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<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\">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<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c617kl241z91o?at_medium=RSS&#038;at_campaign=rss\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the years that followed the Beagle 2 mission, the UK contributed significantly to flagship space projects, including the Rosetta comet chaser and the James Webb Space Telescope. &#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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":62139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[16995,1960,1258,1295,2203,4395,9287,6192],"class_list":["post-62138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-beagle","tag-bristol","tag-honour","tag-led","tag-mars","tag-mission","tag-plaque","tag-scientist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62140,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62138\/revisions\/62140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}