Here’s one (OF MANY) reasons, why I believe this whole debacle has occurred;
From;
www.spacedaily.com...
“The lander's Gas Analysis Package, or GAP, was central to its mission to discover signs of past or present life on Mars. The only previous
life-detection experiments on Mars were carried out by NASA's Viking 1 and 2 landers in 1976. "It wasn't that Viking didn't find life," said
Beagle 2 Chief Scientist, Professor Colin Pillinger, "it was that they thought the conditions were just so horrid, so harsh, nobody anticipated that
life could exist there."
"The Beagle 2 project was based on martian meteorite studies," said Pillinger. "I think the real thing that is driving us back to wanting to look
at whether there is life on Mars is something that Viking did that nobody anticipated, nobody planned. It was that they were able to show that we have
martian meteorites on Earth."
"The discovery of water in martian meteorites was made just after Viking. Of course, we didn't know then they were martian meteorites," said
Pillinger. "But we found evidence of water trickling through martian meteorites, we found carbonates in martian meteorites that was definitely
indigenous. And we found organic matter. I believe that the organic matter is there in an amount that can't just be explained by contamination.
However, I can't prove it. And if I can't prove something, I just simply say, right, what are we going to do next? Go find another experiment."”
And, from the same interview, (“A METHANE TEASER…”)
See my previous links to METHANE DETECTION ON MARS SINCE VIKING 2 LANDER;
“As for the future, the Beagle 2 team is already considering what might be possible with a Beagle 3 mission. "Viking did a very noble job," said
Pillinger. "They had three experiments, which were configured to see whether there were any actively metabolizing organisms on the planet. [Beagle 2]
was not doing a metabolism experiment. The thing which is crucial as far as I'm concerned is we need to see whether we can detect any organic
[biologically produced] matter.

