Colin Pillinger

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Colin Pillinger, CBE, (born in Bristol May 9, 1943) is a planetary scientist at the Open University in the UK. He graduated with a BSc and a Ph.D. at the University of Wales Swansea. In May 2005 he was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis. [1]

1 Career
2 Beagle 2
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Career

1965 B.Sc (Chemistry) from University of Wales, Swansea
1968 Ph.D (Chemistry) from University of Wales, Swansea
1981 Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
1981 member of the British Mass Spectrometry Society
1984 D.Sc (Chemistry) from University of Bristol
1986 Fellow of the Meteoritical Society
1991 made Professor of Planetary Sciences at Open University
1993 member of the IAU
1993 Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
1993 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
1996 - 2000 Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in the City of London
2003 made a CBE

[edit] Beagle 2

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He was the principal investigator for the Beagle 2 Mars lander project, part of European Space Agency's 2003 Mars Express mission.

Pillinger took a sometimes forceful role in advocating the Beagle 2 project. Beagle 2 is believed to have had a failure related to the parachute system (supplied, after trials, by NASA), but the exact reason will likely not be known until an on-site assessment can be performed. Its failure was sent up in adult/black humour comic Viz's Farmer Palmer cartoon strip, as Pillinger is also a turkey farmer himself.

Several months later, on September 8, 2004, another spacecraft with which Pillinger had a design role^{[citation needed]}, Genesis, suffered a parachute (again supplied by by NASA) failure during the descent phase, though the subsequent determination of the cause of Genesis's parachute failure rules out any link between the two incidents.