Beagle 2 Beagle 2 The Beagle 2 was a British Mars lander that was transported by the European Space Agency's 2003 "Mars Express" mission. It was an astrobiology mission that would have looked for past life on the shallow surface of Mars. The spacecraft was successfully deployed from the "Mars Express" on 19 December 2003 and was scheduled to land on the surface of Mars on 25 December; however, no contact was received at the expected time of landing on Mars. ESA declared the mission lost in February 2004, after numerous attempts to contact the spacecraft were made. The "Beagle 2" fate
Robinson Crusoe on Mars Butler and Academy Award-winning matte artist Albert Whitlock gave the film the benefit of "big-studio resources usually lacking in movies about outer space". Whitlock provided the matte paintings used in "Robinson Crusoe on Mars". "Some scenes of spacecraft in motion were created with the kind of flat animation seen in official NASA promotional films". For the alien spacecraft, designer Albert Nozaki constructed three miniatures closely resembling the "Martian war machines" he had made previously for Haskin for "The War of the Worlds" (1953). Byron Haskin told his interviewer Joe Adamson, “"Robinson Crusoe on Mars" was so obviously a director’s tour