Colin Pillinger
The Open University scientist who studied carbon in meteorites and led Beagle 2, Britain's lander for Mars.
Key facts
- Born
- 1943
- Died
- 2014
- Nationality
- British
- Field
- Planetary scientist
Colin Trevor Pillinger was born in Kingswood near Bristol and studied chemistry at Swansea. He became an expert in analysing the light elements, especially carbon, in tiny samples, and worked on lunar rocks from the Apollo missions.
At the Open University he built a laboratory that could measure carbon and its isotopes in very small amounts of meteorite. His group studied Martian meteorites, finding organic material and carbonates in some of them, and argued that meteorites such as EETA 79001 recorded the chemistry of water on Mars. These results made him keen to look for signs of life on Mars directly.
Pillinger proposed and led Beagle 2, a small British lander named after Charles Darwin's ship, carried to Mars by the European Space Agency's Mars Express. It was released on 19 December 2003 and was due to land on Christmas Day, but no signal was ever received. In 2015, a year after his death, images from a NASA orbiter showed that Beagle 2 had landed safely but that its solar panels had not fully opened, blocking its antenna.
Pillinger was a colourful public figure who did much to raise interest in space science in Britain. The asteroid 15614 Pillinger is named after him.