David Southwood from the Cassini mission to Saturn, landed successfully on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Southwood later described the Huygens landing as "the highest point of all" from his ESA career. Southwood had also led the team which developed the magnetometer on the main Cassini spacecraft. During 2003 ESA launched a largely British lander, Beagle 2, which was carried to Mars by the larger Mars Express spacecraft. All contact with Beagle 2 was lost before it reached the surface of Mars, and the project was considered a failure. ESA was heavily criticised for its management of the mission. Southwood suffered public criticism
Timekeeping on Mars average length of a Martian sidereal day is (88,642.66300 seconds based on SI units), and the length of its solar day (often called a "sol") is (88,775.244147 seconds). The corresponding values for Earth are currently and , respectively. This yields a conversion factor of 1.02749125170 days/sol. Thus Mars' solar day is only about 2.7% longer than Earth's. A convention used by spacecraft lander projects to date has been to keep track of local solar time using a 24-hour "Mars clock" on which the hours, minutes and seconds are 2.7% longer than their standard (Earth) durations. For the Mars Pathfinder, Mars